The results showed that, indeed, the aforementioned operator layout was not anywhere close to what people seemed to naturally expect: In an attempt to determine the optimal configuration, rather than suggest specific number/letter layouts, the researchers simply gave various potential layouts and asked test subjects to fill in what they thought was the best configuration, given a particular layout. How this particular configuration was developed isn’t known, but whether or not this was really an optimal layout was something later studied, for instance in the paper Expected Locations of Digits and Letters on Ten-Button Keysets, published in a 1955 edition of The Journal of Applied Psychology. Before push button phone systems found their way into the home of the consumer, a version of this existed for phone operators, with a popular form being two vertical rows of five buttons with the numbers and alphabet laid out in a curious fashion, as picture to the right. The standard phone keypad layout is an entirely different story. In fact, there is no record of any of these companies making the first desktop calculators actually doing any studies to determine if this type of layout was optimal for users. Quickly becoming standard, when companies like Sharp, Canon, Sanyo and Texas Instruments began making electronic calculators in the 1960s, they simply retained the convention. It’s not clear why numbering pads designed for calculation have 7-8-9 at the top, although the practice of placing the larger numbers above the smaller can be seen as far back as the late 19th century on early mechanical cash registers, often in this case with rows numbering vertically with 9 at the top and 0 at the bottom, and later morphing into the more traditional keypad we see today.
0 kommentar(er)
