![]() Comparing various layouts including two-row, "This was due to research conducted by Bell Labs using test subjects The phone design of 123 Top, and 789 Bottom was merely based on the research done by the Bell's labs: The decision by Bell Labs, or whomever, to reverse the layout was thoughtless at best, stupid at worst. Imagine my shock when reversed digital keys appeared on telephones. This was also in the days of rotary phones. Mistakes were extremely rare, and required a redo of the entire document. I became very fast at this touch based skill, as my eyes were on the numbers on paper (there was no visual feedback - just the numbers that were printing on the tape, but you didn't look at that. Index finger was for the left column, next two for adjacent ones. The keyboard layout was identical to present computer layouts as well present digital calculators. In the early sixties I took a year out of university and got a job in the internal audit department at the head office of a large insurance company in Toronto.Ī substantial part of my job involved using an electromechanical calculator to check figures submitted by various departments. This might be the reason that the more natural ordering is used, since there's no reason to complicate. Since phone numbers have a fixed number of digits which randomly scattered, the Benford's law doesn't apply here, which means all the digits occur with similar frequencies. This is why the zero key is especially large. ![]() Therefore it's sensible to put digits 1, 2, and 3 to the bottom row, as it's closer to the enter and also user reaches them easier.Īs pointed out in the comments, 0 tends to occur very frequently as well, due to rounding using the decimal number system. The graph is something like this and shows heavy bias against the digit "1". It says, that digits 1,2,3 occur more often than 7,8,9 when dealing with random, arbitrarily big numbers, which numbers that users type into calculators, in fact, are. You probably have heard of the Benford's law, also known as the "First digit law". Since I come from mathematics background, this is the first thing that comes to mind. However, records of AT&T Labs' research clearly invalidate it. There's also a theory that phone engineers wanted to slow down people who were fast at entering numerical data, which would jam lines and produce dialing errors, so they reversed the layout. Still, when it came time to place a numeric keypad on a computer keyboard, the calculator model with 7-8-9 at the top prevailed. It turns out that decision was largely arbitrary: no one had done any research about which layout was most convenient for users.
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