What is affordance?

Affordances are possibilities for action offered by environment: objects, artifacts, technologies. This concept was created to complement the functional view with an emphasis on users’ actions, and help identify potential failures or negative effects which the other approaches have difficulty identifying. And though this approach will never provide the creator with all potential user actions, it helps change one’s viewpoint to a more reflective one, and devise organizational designs and technologies that are safer and easier to use.