James Gibson wrote about the idea of affordance in 1979. He described affordances as action possibilities in the environment. In 1988 Don Norman modified the idea of affordances in his book The Design of Everyday Things.
He referred to the idea of perceived affordances:

if you want people to take action on an object, whether in real life or on a computer screen, you need to make sure that they can easily perceive, figure out, and interpret what the object is and what they can and should do with it.