iPhone numeric keypad organizations
Topic addressed during lunch with Etienne Mineur in a nice italian restaurant.
Or… the intriguing settings of the numeric keypads on the iPhone.
Yes “keypads” is plural because there are two layouts:
- The dial layout: “1 2 3″ in the lower segment.
- The calculator layout: “1 2 3″ in the upper segment.
Why two layouts? For a reason I explained here already: this basic interface evolved from two different culture, which are the calculators culture (started with Felt and Tarrant’s Comptometer) and the telephone keypad.
Why do I blog this? What we have here is a tremendously interesting example of an interface clash between two design cultures. It’s highly intriguing to see that it has not been made more cohesive. Perhaps both layouts are so sticky that it would be weird to unify them? Who’s ready to change that?
December 7th, 2008 at 1:01 am
Another interesting clash of these standards is ATM PIN keypads, which are pretty universally using telephone keypads (despite being closer in design and function to the computer world). I’ve wondered for a long time why exactly that layout was used over the calculator style…
December 7th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
This keypad thing has been also my long time question before iPhone. One day, I thought why the keys alignments are different between a calculator and TV controller.
From my laziness, I haven’t pursued it yet. It probably is depending on purposes and the way of we use the devices. Or there must be from CHI matter that our brain accumulate things in our moderm life for years.
September 16th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
[…] the classic and clean version of the standard model in Paris. The keypad layout, a topic we already addressed here about the iphone is the classical “dial layout” that comes from the telephone set (as […]