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Signifier 0:26
A 26-second explainer of Signifier, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.
Try the interactive Signifier demo
What this video covers
A signifier is the visible cue that tells users what to do and where - such as an underline for a link, a shadow for a button, or a handle for dragging. While affordance indicates what an element can do, the signifier announces how to use it. A button that can be clicked is useless without a signifier to show it’s clickable.
The "clean" version hid every cue, so you had to guess - or hover and hunt - to find what was actually a button. The signified version costs nothing but a border, a shadow, an underline, and suddenly there's no guessing: the interface tells you where to act. That's the whole job of a signifier - not decoration, but communication.
