“This defies all conventional economic logic, but it does not defy psycho-logic. Morita thought the presence of a recording function would confuse people about what the new device was for. Was it for dictation? Should I record my vinyl record collection onto cassette? Or should I record live music? In the same way that McDonald’s omitted cutlery from its restaurants to make it obvious how you were supposed to eat its hamburgers, **by removing the recording function from Walkmans, Sony produced a product that had a lower range of functionality, but a far greater potential to a change behaviour**. By reducing the possible applications of the device to a single use, it clarified what the device was for. The technical design term for this is an ‘affordance’, a word that deserves to be more widely known. As [[Don Norman]] observes: “‘The term affordance refers to **the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used**. [. . .] Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. **When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed**.’” --- **Tags** -- [[templates]], [[quotes]], [[essentialism]] , [[market-research]] , [[product-management]] , [[psycho-logic]] , [[alchemy]] , [[counter-intuitive-thinking]] **Source** -- [[202407221554 - B - Alchemy]], [[affordance]]