Signifiers

Signifiers – signs that tell the user what’s possible, rather than a physical thing that tells a user what’s possible.

Signifiers are far more relevant for digital design.

As a digital designer, you don’t have the full facilities of a real environment to drive action. Rather, you need to rely on your signs to tell people what to do – thus, signifiers take the place of the affordances. - Don Norman

The goal is to let users to add description with less Slips (error). There were discussions whether having a pencil icon is sufficient enough to invite users to tap and add descriptions. Here, we decided to put 3 signifiers: outline, a copy, and the pencil icon.