This was both for personal convenience, and because it tied up the phone lines for less time with the dialing pulses. I expect that the bias to the winning phone design came because of the bias in phone numbers - that is, because rotary dial phones would dial lower numbers more quickly, lower numbers were more sought after, and were allocated to higher population areas. I'm curious about the difference between the calculator and phone layouts. Interestingly, the most creative benefit I’ve heard for keeping the calculator layout as it is, is because calculators are often used to sum up real world measurements, and these fall under to purview of Benford’s Law* Because of this, the keys which are more likely to be used as the leading digits are closer to the at-rest position of the hand and require less energy to move and press … yeah … I’m not convinced either, but it sounds good Had extensive testing been performed by the original adding machine developers, maybe both devices would use the same layout. (If I had to speculate as to why this layout performs slightly better than the calculator layout, I might suggest that, in the West, we read left->right and top->bottom and so this is the more natural numbering scheme). They tested both canonical forms of the (3x3)+1 layout and selected what we now know today as the telephone layout. The whole point of the article is the Bell labs undertook an extensive user based study to investigate which layouts might be better (Pretty much the first time this testing had been done on this issue). The inventors of these early devices did not perform extensive user based testing (as it often the case in technology early adopters end up creating standards that others follow, good or bad). Numeric keypad layouts mimic calculator layouts, which in turn, mimicked the original ‘adding machines’. Why the difference between numeric keypads and phone keypads? Or in other words, we still don’t have a solid answer to the question “Why are the numbers on a telephone keypad arranged the way they are?” it fit better on a particular phone body design), though I’ve never seen any concrete explanations of how the final grid layout was chosen. I assume the company’s final choice was based on some engineer or manager’s aesthetic preferences or non-human-factors technical criteria (e.g.
the 5x2 grid, the vote tally was 12-3 in favor of the 5x2 gris. In the final test between the 3x3+1 grid vs. The lowest errors and fastest keying rate were actually with the standard circular telephone arrangement (most familiar), followed by the two-row five-column layout, and those were also the test subjects’ preferred layouts. Here’s a link to a scan where the OCR doesn’t clobber the image.
The original paper is thorough and well worth reading for anyone interested in designing keyboard-type input devices. This blog post doesn’t really add anything beyond what the original paper says, though at least it links to it, though the OCR font replacement in the version he links isn’t my cup of tea.
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