Phone keypad layout1/12/2024 ![]() ![]() Given the hundreds of millions of calls placed each day, controlled research parlayed the small but significant edge of one keypad layout into a giant productivity gain. Having one single user interface allows not only for efficient manufacture of telephones, but for callers to use their phones quickly and with fewer errors, without have to learn new layouts for numbers and letters. Thanks to scientific findings backed by an international standards body, callers worldwide can count on their phone having a simple, predictable layout. Somehow, Alfred Hitchcock's classic film "Dial M for Murder" would sound a lot less catchy as "Press Pound For Murder." Otherwise, the benefits of a well-designed keypad are clear. Bringing his Yale psychology training (PhD in 1943) to a career in industry, he worked, according to his obituary in The New York Times, "to make new technologies simpler to use and work environments and systems safer and more efficient." He was president of the Society of Engineering Psychologists and the Human Factors Society (now the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society). As for Alphonse Chapanis and his nascent field of ergonomics, he not only pinpointed why B-17 bombers kept crashing on the runway in World War II, but he also co-authored the first ergonomics textbook, helped improve the safety of aircraft cockpits, pioneered the design of teleconferencing and videoconferencing systems, studied the intelligibility of digitized speech, and championed the role of the user in human-computer interaction. Still posted on the Web (see Sources & Further Reading), the published article shows what the phone keypad might have looked like - with the numbers 1 to 10 arrayed in circles, semicircles, diagonal slashes, with the numbers ascending from bottom to top, and more. Chapanis reported that Deininger's research showed, among other things, that "the most preferred arrangements tended to be best in terms of performance." Those findings were published in 1960. Yet as studies have revealed, that simply wasn't so.Īfter Chapanis returned to his academic duties, Deininger followed up by having people key numbers into various configurations of keysets. "The most preferred configuration is the one you will now find on all push-button telephones."įrom the distance of more than 30 years later, Chapanis proudly claimed, "The arrangement that Lutz and I and Deininger found best is now used on millions of telephones around the world." The application of basic psychological research to industrial design resulted in a simple keypad that seems so obvious as to have been the only possible layout. "For all six different configurations of keysets, subjects showed an overwhelming preference for numbering arrangements in which numerals increase from left to right and from top to bottom," Chapanis recalled. The researchers asked participants to place numbers and letters on the keys according to where they thought they should be. Chapanis and Lutz tested 300 people, 150 men and 150 women, stratified in three age groups - divided evenly between persons who claimed to be either naïve or sophisticated with regard to the use of keysets. "I designed a study to determine what in human factors are called 'population stereotypes.' I wanted to find out where people expect to find numbers and letters on keys," he recalled. In the early 1990s, 10 years before his death in 2002, Chapanis reminisced about how he solved the problem of the push-button phone. Lutz was deceptively simple: What should a push-button telephone look like? To people who've never known anything but the simple 10-button grid (three rows, three columns with the 0 on the bottom the star and "pound" buttons came later as well as the letters Q and Z), the problem actually required thoughtful, systematic design and testing. The question facing Chapanis and lab assistant Mary C. Thus, its determination at the time to move from rotary dials to a push-button design would change the telephone for all users. Bell Telephone, in the days before deregulation, monopolized the industry. The late Alphonse Chapanis, PhD, PA, an industrial and human factors psychologist, took a leave of absence from his post at the Johns Hopkins University in 19 to work on the technical staff at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Whatever happened to the rotary phone? Psychological testing helped design the ubiquitous push-button keypad for the telephone. ![]()
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