[Sigia-l] Summer Reading - User Behavior Drove Phone Design

[Christopher Fahey]

> I thought that was a good question. So I googled and came up 
> with this:
> 
>
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/frequently_asked_questions.html#keyPa
ds

The explanation posited at that URL (that 1950s accountants using touch-pad
phones would dial so fast that they'd mess up the system and make someone's
ROI report look bad), while dramatic, seems pretty apocryphal and dodgy to
me. 

Doesn't it make more sense that the Bell Labs people (who were not famous
for any lack of smarts) might have wanted the numbers to read left-to-right
and top-to-bottom just like normal text (and, remember, the number buttons
soon had letters on them, too)? Also perhaps "people who use calculators" in
the 1950s might have comprised such a tiny fraction of the US population
that it was safe to just write them off and require them to think
differently when using the phone? I don't know what the majority accountants
were generally using in the pre-digital age, but I doubt there were even
1/100th as many mechanical calculating machines in existence as there were
telephones.

In fact, I think this is an example of the phone industry getting it right
by working from scratch and making user-centric design decisions, while the
keypad-calculator industry got it dead wrong by basing their design
decisions on the hodgepodge of wild inventions preceding it. Take one look
at the history of calculating machines and it's obvious that the
"counting-from-bottom-to-top" approach has its roots in what looks like
utter design chaos and engineering-centric design principles (that is,
button positions were dictated by the manner which the internal gears and
mechanisms were configured)
(http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/mechanical_calculators.html)

Cheers,
-Cf

Christopher Fahey
____________________________
Behavior
http://www.behaviordesign.com
me: http://www.graphpaper.com