Affordance Agent Skill

Use this skill whenever the question is whether the user can tell what an element does — whether it looks clickable, draggable…

Context cost
6k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
2 files · 24.0 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
Apache-2.0the author’s own terms
Last change
—no release on file
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Use this skill whenever the question is whether the user can tell what an element does — whether it looks clickable, draggable, expandable, editable, or interactive at all. Trigger when designing buttons, links, custom controls, drag handles, draggable cards, editable inline fields, or any interactive element. Trigger on reviews when users hesitate, miss controls, or click on things that aren''t interactive.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

design
Filed under

Design & Media

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md17.0 kB · preview
--- name: affordance ---
6# Affordance
7
8Affordance is the relationship between an object's properties and the actions it makes possible. A door handle affords pulling; a flat plate affords pushing; a button affords pressing; a slider affords sliding. When the affordance matches the intended use, the design works without instruction. When the affordance contradicts the intended use, even a sign saying "PUSH" cannot fully repair it — users still try to pull the handle first.
9
10## Definition (in our own words)
11
12Affordance is what an object's appearance, shape, weight, and material tell the user about what they can do with it. The affordance lives partly in the object itself (a button has a graspable shape) and partly in the user's perception of it (a child seeing a button for the first time has a different model than an adult who's seen ten thousand). Designers control the visual and behavioral signals; users bring prior experience. Where the two align, the design "just works"; where they diverge, the user must read, ask, or guess.
13
14## Origins and research lineage
15
16- **James J. Gibson**, *The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception* (Houghton Mifflin, 1979). Gibson coined "affordance" in ecological psychology to describe what an environment offers an animal: a horizontal surface affords standing; a graspable object affords carrying. The concept predates HCI but maps naturally to it.
17- **Donald Norman**, *The Design of Everyday Things* (1988, revised 2013). Translated affordance from Gibson's perceptual psychology into design vocabulary. Norman's iconic example — doors that look like they pull but actually push — became shorthand for affordance failure.
18- **Norman's later refinement** — "Signifiers, not affordances" (2008). Norman clarified that what designers actually control are *signifiers* (visible cues that suggest an action). The affordance is the underlying possibility; the signifier is what tells the user about it. The book's principle covers both, but the distinction matters in fine-grained design discussion.
19- **Lidwell, Holden & Butler** (2003) compactly stated the principle as "a property in which the physical characteristics of an object or environment influence its function" and gave the door-handle-vs-flat-plate example as the canonical illustration.
20- **Web/UI affordance research** — Bagrow, Tognazzini, and many others have studied how affordance translates to flat 2D screens. The shift from skeuomorphic to flat design (around 2013) reduced traditional affordance signals; subsequent recovery (subtle shadows, hover states, motion) has rebuilt them in less literal forms.
21
22## Why affordance matters
23
24Affordance is the fastest comprehension channel a UI has. A user looking at a screen for half a second can tell — preattentively, before reading a single label — which elements are interactive and which are content. Strong affordance lets the user form a working theory of the page in seconds; weak affordance forces them to point at things and watch what happens.
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md2,471 words
Files2
LicenceApache-2.0
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈180
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
5,820
on trigger
The instruction body and 1 supporting file, read only when the skill fires.
3.0%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 30% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

6k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

2 files, 24.0 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md17.0 kB
  • references/gibson-norman-and-flat-design.md7.0 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 2 files you can review in full before installing. The Apache-2.0 licence covers the templates and examples as well as the instructions.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Affordance · 6k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/affordance/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/affordance" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/affordance ] || { mv .claude/skills/affordance "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/affordance" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/affordance"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add hashgraph-online/affordance

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/affordance/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/affordance/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/affordance" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/affordance ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/affordance "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/affordance" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/affordance" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/affordance/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Versionnot versioned
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencehashgraph-online/affordance

Versions

Its author publishes no version number, so there is nothing here to pin to: what you install is the folder as it stands today. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

Pinning

Nothing to pin to: this skill carries no version number of its own. What you install is what the folder holds on the day you install it.

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Publisher
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