At a fundamental level, we as humans process information as value first, then perception after. Meaning, when we see something, first we ask what does this want me to do, then we ask what does this mean.
This is the basic gist of an affordance. Simplified even more, an affordance is the notion that things in the world are tools. They allow us to transition from one physical or abstract place to another. When done poorly, or intentionally, we see the world as filled with obstacles. We want to get to another state, but we don’t have the tools to get there.
Good Design, Bad design
To me, this is the essence of good design. Its not how it looks per se, it is the accurate and obvious implementation of affordances. This reduces down to two core questions.
(1) What do users want to do?
(2) How obvious is it that they can do that?
Open Finance
Now, I think it is really interesting to apply these questions to finance. Specifically, the new parallel financial system that is emerging.
What do users want to do in open finance?
They want to earn money/speculate
They want to exit the financial system
They want to be in control of their funds
They want increased transparency
They want money that acts more like native software products
While these questions are somewhat known, they still need to be refined further through talking to humans.
But it is the second question that I think is actually more pressing. How obvious is that users can do the above functions? Not that obvious!
Thus, I believe that in Open Finance / Crypto / DeFi we need to start thinking about new and better sets of affordances that make it more obvious to people what they can do.