Number Pad Layouts
March 6th, 2008
Has anyone ever noticed how telephones have 123 on the top row whilst calculators have 123 on the bottom row?
According to How Stuff Works, the calculator layout with 123 at the bottom actually came first.
One theory was that touch tone telephone engineers reversed the layout deliberately so data entry professionals, who were used to the calculator layout, would take a greater amount of time to enter the numbers. This was necessary as the tone recognition in old telephones wasn’t fast enough!
- Cool Stuff , Maths , Science
- Comments(2)
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I had this problem when i made a number pad for a field data logging system to run on a touch screen PDA. What was the natural layout for me was completely counter intuitive for the industrial boiler engineers the system was designed for!
Just goes to show UI design is always in the eyes of the user I guess.
that makes sense.. very interesting.
Love,
Janice