Affordances, Mental Models, and Tool Time. You'll learn what we've learned from hundreds of usability tests and you'll have a chance to try it out in your designs. Affordances are built-in clues that communicate to users how to use the product. Buttons, icons, words, and other controls make up the visual language which helps users know what to do. See how Microsoft and Lotus have used affordances in their products.
Users develop their own Mental Models to explain how the product works.
These models are essential to understanding your application's capabilities. We'll show you how you can design the mental models your users develop. Tool Time is the portion of time that users spend being distracted by the interface instead of focusing on their own work. You'll see examples of how you can reduce tool time to improve user productivity. The high point of this course is our design competition.