Affordances and Feedback in Nuance-Oriented Interfaces

Virtual Environments (VEs) and perceptive user interfaces must deal with complex users and their modes of interaction. One way to approach this problem is to recognize users’ nuances (subtle conscious or unconscious actions). In exploring nuance-oriented interfaces, we attempted to let users work as they preferred without being biased by feedback or affordances in the system. The hope was that we would discover the users’ innate models of interaction. The results of two user studies were that users are guided not by any innate model but by affordances and feedback in the interface. So, without this guidance, even the most obvious and useful components of an interface will be ignored.