UX glossary · engl. Signifier
Signifier
A signifier is a perceivable cue that shows what you can do with an element and where, like a “Pull” sign on a door or a button with a clear shape.
Imagine you’re standing in front of a glass door in an office building. Both sides have the same bar handle. You pull, nothing happens. You push, and the door opens. It could be opened all along. What was missing was a clue about how.
The same thing happens on screens all the time: a piece of gray text in an app is actually a button, but nothing gives it away.
Explained simply
A signifier is a perceivable cue that shows you what you can do with something and where. In everyday life, that might be a “Pull” sign on a door or a flat metal plate that practically asks to be pushed.
The term comes from Don Norman, cognitive scientist and author of the classic The Design of Everyday Things. Norman brought the term affordance into design in 1988. Because people often used it loosely, he suggested in a 2008 column for the journal ACM Interactions that designers should talk about signifiers instead. He introduced the concept in depth in the revised 2013 edition of his book.
Affordance vs. signifier
An affordance describes which action is possible between an object and a person. A chair affords sitting, a door affords opening. The signifier is the signal that makes this possibility visible. In short: the affordance determines what’s possible. The signifier shows what’s possible and where.
This distinction matters even more in digital products. On a screen, almost any element could be clickable. Whether it actually does something is up to the code. Whether people notice is up to the signifiers: colored, underlined links, buttons with a fill or border, a cursor that turns into a hand, a magnifying glass in a search field, or placeholder text that says what goes in the field.
Norman also points to signifiers that nobody designed on purpose. His example is a path worn across a lawn: it shows where people actually want to walk. Digital products have social cues like this too, such as ratings or a note on how many others have already used something.
An example
Here’s an example: in a banking app, three words sit below the account balance in gray text: “Transfer”, “Standing orders” and “Export”. You can tap them, but they look like labels. So many people look for transfers in the menu and take much longer than necessary.
After the redesign, each element gets an icon, a colored background and rounded corners. The features are exactly the same. Now, though, you can tell at a glance that you can tap them.
Common misconceptions
You’ll often hear: “This button needs more affordance.” What people almost always mean is a clearer signifier, because the button was clickable all along. A signifier also isn’t automatically an icon. Text, position, shape, color and motion all provide cues. And signifiers can mislead: an underlined word that isn’t a link promises an action that doesn’t exist.
In practice
- Make clickable things obvious. Give interactive elements at least one clear feature, such as color, a fill or an underline. How easily an icon on its own gets misread is covered in The 4 Most Frequently Asked Questions About the Hamburger Menu.
- Stay consistent. If links are sometimes blue and sometimes black, signifiers lose their meaning. A design system helps you style cues the same way everywhere.
- Test without explaining. Usability testing shows whether people find a feature on their own. If you have to point it out, a signifier is missing.
Related terms
Affordance, Mental Model, Microcopy, Hamburger Menu