Think of affordances as rungs on a ladder you're building while you climb. Each new rung only makes sense if you can reach the one just below it, so every step you add quietly assumes a prior fluency. They've been building this ladder for decades now, and the lower rungs are starting to rot while we're still hammering new ones at the top.
Take the QWERTY keyboard. It's scaffolding debt from the typewriter era, yet it still shapes every text interaction we design. When Apple introduced Force Touch on MacBooks, they assumed users had already climbed through clicking, then right-clicking, then two-finger clicking. Each innovation depends on the last.
This is the perpetual tension in interface design: mature users want compressed moves while beginners need expanded sequences. Power Photoshop users lived for single keystrokes that batch five operations. Meanwhile, someone opening the app for the first time needs those same five operations spelled out in readable menus. The best designs expose both layers. Notion keeps slash commands for the climbers at the top while maintaining a visible toolbar for those still finding their footing.
You can build bridges between rungs.
Nintendo's Wii wrapped 3-axis motion control in a TV remote shell. Everyone already knew how to point a remote at a screen, so that familiar shape became the bridge to an entirely new interaction model. No tutorials needed. Your body already knew what to do.
Instagram did the same thing when they copied Snapchat's Stories, down to the exact circular profile bubbles at the top of the screen. They weren't being lazy; they were being smart. Why force users to learn a new rung when you can borrow one they've already climbed?
Of course, rungs decay over time. The floppy disk save icon means nothing to anyone born after 2000. The "hang up" gesture of thumb and pinky extended makes no sense in the age of rectangular phones. These affordances have passed their half-life, their meaning slowly leaking away through cultural drift. Yet we keep them around because removing them would strand the millions who learned computing when disks actually flopped.
And this is where nostalgia becomes the invisible hand tugging on our ladder. That floppy disk persists not for clarity but for comfort. It's emotional glue, a memory of how things felt when we first learned to save our work.
Apple understood this when they designed the first iPhone. Those early versions of Notes with yellow legal pad textures and torn edges weren't functional choices. They were emotional bridges, soothing users as they crossed from paper to glass. The wooden bookshelves in iBooks, the green felt of Game Center, all of it bought time for the real affordances underneath to take hold. By iOS 7, when everyone was fluent in touch, Jony Ive could strip away the textures. The ladder was stable enough to remove the decorative handrails.
Nintendo keeps returning to this playbook. The NES Classic shipped with chunky brick controllers even though wafer-thin Bluetooth would've been cheaper. But that familiar heft in your hands signals something deeper than function. It says "you already know how to play." Parents can hand controllers to kids without explaining anything. The nostalgia fills the gaps in the dependency graph.
The flip side is that sentiment creates drag. When Slack redesigned their sidebar in 2020, the backlash forced them to add toggles and concessions within weeks. Kill a beloved affordance too quickly and watch your support tickets spike. Sometimes you need to run both ladders in parallel, letting people climb the old one until they're ready to jump across.
Google learned this with Material Design, running it alongside legacy interfaces for years. Apple watches use a literal crown you twist to scroll/zoom. It piggybacks on centuries of watch muscle memory to teach a new interaction model on glass– a perfect emotional bridge that’s also functional.
If you mapped each affordance as a dependency graph with explicit edges instead of folklore, you could spot where the chain is about to snap. You could insert bridges before anyone falls off. But we rarely do this. We build by intuition and ship when it feels right, then wonder why some users get stranded.
The trick is to map not just the technical dependencies but the emotional ones. Mark the rungs people love. Those become the ones you replace with tribute skins, easter egg modes, or museum toggles instead of cold removal.
But clinging too tightly is dangerous too. Some affordances aren’t just outdated, they actively block progress. They consume space, introduce confusion, or prevent better metaphors from taking hold. At times, the hard but necessary choice is to force users forward, to cut off the rung so the ladder can extend higher.
Apple’s abandonment of skeuomorphism was jarring, but it cleared the way for today’s flat, flexible UI systems. The same can be said about the shift toward liquid glass aesthetic: interfaces that abandon imitation in favor of translucency, layering, and depth. These aren’t just cosmetic moves; they point toward a future where we see through our UIs, where depth becomes an affordance in its own right. Removing an old rung can be more than housekeeping, it can be an act of direction-setting, clearing a path toward the world designers want users to inhabit.
Every affordance is provisional. To design responsibly is to know when to keep the scaffolding, when to remove it, and when to force a collective step upward. The ladder of progress is built not just on what we add, but on what we let go.