Affordances matter

Or, how the iOS 7 shift key could be fixed.

This isn’t news, but the shift key in iOS 7 is broken. That is to say, it is functional, it just doesn’t work. Most of the people who will read this have thought it, read about it, or wrote about it themselves.

The problem comes down to one simple problem: Visual affordance. I won’t go into to detail about why it’s important, or what it means. A simple Google search will show that people, a heck of a lot smarter than me, have written about this in great detail.

It needs to be clear what something does, and when it’s doing it.

Apple’s iOS 7 keyboard gets the first part right, but it completely fails at the second. It’s clear where the shift key is, but it isn’t clear when the shift key is active. In other words, there is an affordance, it’s just not strong enough.