I would like to apply discursive interface analysis to reddit.com. This website is a network of communities where people can dive into a wide variety of different topics.
First, the functional affordances, or design features that help users achieve goals, of Reddit primarily focus on community-related features. These include, but are not limited to, creating posts, joining communities, chatting with other users, upvoting and downvoting posts, and commenting on posts.
Second, the cognitive affordances, or design features that help users notice or know about things, are a critical aspect of the website, as it revolves around its users posting and/or obtaining information. Primary examples of these affordances are an occasionally animated logo to draw attention to seasonal or cultural events being celebrated on the website and “flairs” that are colorfully tagged to post based on the category of their content.
Third, the sensory affordances, or design features that help users sense something, are common on Reddit’s website. These include a notification bell that “pings” when new posts and comments of interest are published and the audio of videos published by users. I wanted to include some visual examples as well, but I designated them as more closely mirroring cognitive affordances.
Finally, the development of these affordances have collectively established norms for modern website interfaces. Their design features have all evolved over decades to establish their usefulness for users and thus becoming norms. For example, the norm of user control and freedom is a functional affordance, the emergence and implementation of icons (such as a bell for notifications) is a cognitive affordance, and auditory pings are sensory affordances.
Using tools like the Wayback Machine, its obvious that reddit’s website design has changed drastically over time. In the early 2000s, there was an abundance of text with few images and no auditory features. This version relied heavily on functional affordances and a lack of cognitive and sensory ones. Fast forwarding to today, the website uses all three types abundantly and efficiently.
