Why do computer keyboards & calculators have the low numbers at the bottom and telephones have the low numbers starting at the top?
A life mystery for me?
Bertieman.
I’ve always heard that when Ma Bell started making telephones with push buttons they just put the numbers in the order they liked. Adding machines were researched and tested for the most efficient layout to help end users (I think Texas Instruments played a big part in this). I have no backup to support this, though.
Research as far back as 1955 showed that the 1-2-3 arrangement conforms to people’s expectations better than 7-8-9, but the same research also showed that people did not expect there to be any performance difference between the two layouts.
In 1963, the 7-8-9 arrangement was adopted as the British Standard (BS 1909) and the first research on performance with the two formats was conducted in Cambridge.
Unfortunately the research demonstrated that the 1-2-3 layout led to significantly better performance than 7-8-9. This research has been replicated on a number of occasions.
Companies designing numeric keypads therefore had two conflicting pieces of information and it is not known how their decisions were made.
However, whatever the issues were then the problem now is that neither industry can easily change without upsetting many experienced users.
The same problem occurs for alphanumeric keypads where it is now known that qwerty is not the best arrangement, but the major difficulties of changing to better keyboards (e.g. the Dvorak keyboard) are deemed to outweigh the benefits.
With acknowledgement to Mr. David Gilmore, Psychology Department, University of Nottingham, UK
“How Stuff Works” has a blurb on this:
I’ve heard of the Bell Labs study it mentions also, which supposedly established the 1-2-3 arrangement as more natural for people to learn. There would be some justification for doing telephone keypads based on a study like this even if data entry pads already followed a different standard, as most phone customers had no familiarity with data entry pads at that time.
It’s also a very good point that the old rotary dials had imposed an association of numbers “abc” - 2, etc. You couldn’t change that and still have the “alphabetic” form of phone numbers work for both rotary and touch-tone phones. That data-entry pad layout would have screwed up the natural progression of the alphabet.
I meant to say “association of numbers with the alphabet” - that statement wasn’t very clear as written.
Slight hijack: The “Dvorak is faster than QWERTY” thing turns out to be a bit of a myth. The Gummit looked into Dvorak, and concluded that it was no better than QWERTY. (An earlier Navy study had concluded that Dvorak was better…but that study was run by Dvorak.) See:
http://www.independent.org/tii/news/liebowitz_economist.html
(You can safely ignore THE ECONOMIST’s hyperbolic claim that QWERTY is efficient in the economic sense, though. You could only make that claim if you’d tested QWERTY vs. every other possible layout, and I think it’s safe to say the ECONOMIST has not done so.)