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The article contains an image of a (relatively basic) calculator, asking the question: "How many of these buttons will you really push?" Well… all of them. I m

The article contains an image of a (relatively basic) calculator, asking the question: "How many of these buttons will you really push?" Well… all of them. I may not need tan every day, but when I do, I need it to be there.

jeswin 7y ago
I skimmed the article and closed it when I saw the Scientific Calculator being shown as an example of complexity. Most people would stop using it if a "UX Designer" tried to simplify it. Not everything is a todo list app with rounded corners.
- Damogran6 7y ago
  I hope you didn't miss the overall message for one poorly articulated example, then. Because there was an informative point put forth.
  - mosselman 7y ago
    There might have been, but not a very original one at that. Why waste your time on an article written by someone who doesn't grasp the material fully?
  - rq1 7y ago
    This example made the point unbeknownst to the author. This Dieter Rams mantra is a recurring theme. What do you think about cockpits interfaces and Bloomberg terminals? Should we add some more “white spaces”? Prioritising information/functionality does not mean sacrificing their density.
    - Damogran6 7y ago
      I think some things can be easy and some things must trade low learning curve for functionality. I highly doubt Airbus will produce a commercial airliner with a big red “fly to destination” button. (Though I’ve been wrong before)
    - bch 7y ago
      I think your comment points out “context matters”. Cockpits aren’t consumer goods.
      - kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
        Yes but most consumers aren't uneducated idiots, and for the purposes of this discussion, there is nothing that specific about a cockpit that can't be true for a scientific calculator or an audio console. This attitude is how you get Macbook "Professional"s whose keyboards stop working in 2 months.
    - meerita 7y ago
      Indeed. As a designer, I've seen 3000 DR articles. It's a pity designers abuse DR work just to justify their hedonisms. All apps I've seen with DR style have failed. I remember a bizarre podcast app for iOS in 2012 that was like insane DR nightmare and it was pleasant to eyes, but completely useless and utterly boring. It died against other options who were using generic iOS components. DR has born in another era of product design: most products had 1 or 2 features max. There were no playlists, no sharing, no connectivity, etc. It's easy to design when you have only those contraints.
- atoav 7y ago
  But there is a tension between badly implemented feature-rich solutions and well implemented special solutions and very often the specialized solution is much much better than anything else if it fits your usage. I work with modular synthesizers and I certainly would use a well designed interface that knows it’s priorities over one that tries to make every parameter accessible and doesn’t priorize them in any way. If all you want in a car radio is a USB charger and a volume control, a radio with just these two implemented in a deluxe variant (big knob with motor potentiometer?) would be better than say a super duper feature rich car radio that can do everything but hides it behind obscure button combinations and plastic encoders. These complex all purpose devices of course also have their use cases. But very rarely any single user will need more than the most basic stuff. Where it get’s dangerous, is when the general purpose device forgets to design these “90% of the time” use cases properly. So if you scientific calculator design makes it harder to do basic arithmetic, it is probably bad design. On the other hand if you leave out key scientific functionality because you want it to look sleek, it is also bad design. Good design has to be based on real world usage and this is a very case-by-case thing. In the end we need to accept that it is hard to cover all use cases with one interface in a good way — so just make a more than one and let users switch.
  - mark-r 7y ago
    I once had a car where I wanted to upgrade the stereo. Never did it, because the station buttons on the replacements were all too small.
- tobr 7y ago
  > Most people would stop using it if a "UX Designer" tried to simplify it. That’s true, I completely stopped using this type of calculator when the UX designers behind Calca, Soulver and their ilk came up with a much simpler and better design.
  - msla 7y ago
    The better design for a scientific calculator is Maxima, or some other keyboard-driven system where the primary UI is a command line. Why? Because you're communicating information-dense messages (equations, arithmetic problems, functions) and text remains the only way we have to do that. The command line is also the least discoverable UI imaginable. It has absolutely no obvious affordances beyond typing something into it and hoping you typed something the program understood. Even the error messages are going to be opaque unless you have some prior knowledge. There is no "just pick it up and go" with this. On the gripping hand, however, a command line is the most fluent UI short of the Emacs/ITS affinity for keystroke bindings. Once you know how to do something, you can get amazingly fast. It actively rewards muscle memory and familiarity, as opposed to menus and progressive disclosure, which are precisely as clunky on day one thousand as they are on day one. Speaking as an HP-48GX owner, a good button array with shift keys and some context-dependent buttons can be nearly as fast as a command line, but it's inherently more limited. My point is this: Discoverability is in tension with fluency, meaning that designing for experts is inherently different for designing for newbies, or people who use the software so rarely they're effectively always newbies. Removing functionality to unclutter an interface is newbie design thinking, as a command line is never cluttered. (Which isn't to say you can't do both. The Emacs GUI is newbie-friendly unless a newbie is in the habit of jamming odd key combinations at random.)
    - strokirk 7y ago
      There's certainly big differences in command line apps and terminals though. Features like tab completion with inline docstrings, fish-style autocomplete, history with search-as-you-type, infinite scrollback, semantic colors, consistent interfaces, good help pages, dry-running and more all help to increase ease of use, discoverability and quicken the learning curve.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  A lot of applications would be a lot better if all their functionality could be covered in one page with a bunch of buttons.
- meerita 7y ago
  I agree. If any UX Designer thinks that SC are badly designed let them do one and let us figure out how good is their approach. 99.9% of failure for sure. Years and years of iterations on calculators can't be that wrong. But some designers love to write hedonist articles.
alpaca128 7y ago
Not to mention that even if some features(or buttons) are unnecessarily removed it's often the wrong ones, and all that's left is a nonfunctional mess. One of the most extreme examples I encountered was the OneDrive app preinstalled on Windows 8 which had basically no options at all, no features except clicking on files to open them, and couldn't even show how much storage was still available. Minimalism just for the sake of it doesn't end well.
- inapis 7y ago
  Isn't the removal of "wrong" stuff more as a consequence of business decision to pursue the masses and thus you optimize or develop for the lowest common denominator? I don't think any company has ever straddled this line well especially if it's market overlaps between mainstream and power users. Ofc, I mean this is in a general way. The Onedrive example you gave is actually very extreme.
galfarragem 7y ago
Great products do what is relevant, but better. Tools should be as simple as they can but stop there. E.g. Despite my background in design I find Bulk Rename Utility UX - regarding its market target - really effective even if it's ugly. https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/assets/img-bru/mainscr.png https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/assets/img-bru/mainscr.p...
- speedplane 7y ago
  > Great products do what is relevant, but better. I once got into an argument with someone (not a designer) about adding an "export" feature to a table UI. It was an easy feature to add, but the argument against it was that it was yet another rarely used button, that further crowded the UI. And further, users shouldn't need to export because they should be able to do everything they needed from within the app. I was sympathetic to these arguments, especially the second. But many customers repeatedly asked for the export feature. We spoke to several and explained they could do what they needed without exporting, but even after that, they still wanted a "file" they could manipulate. I won, and we added the export feature, and many other smallish features like it. Even though I love a minimalist design and look and feel, it shouldn't come at the expense of features. And in the end, our designers made it unobtrusive and kept it elegant. Good design is not about deconstructing things just for simplicity's sake, but to expose the complexity in a way that feels natural.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > And further, users shouldn't need to export because they should be able to do everything they needed from within the app. That's just greed and extreme entitlement dressed in UX clothes. Your software will never be good enough to suffice for all use cases within a domain; most likely it isn't even particularly ergonomic for bulk of them. Often, the output of your software is needed as input to another piece of software. That's why interoperability is so important, and lack of it is a black mark.
    - speedplane 7y ago
      >> And further, users shouldn't need to export because they should be able to do everything they needed from within the app. > That's just greed and extreme entitlement dressed in UX clothes. I understand the passion here, especially today, users should be able to control data the way the want. However, greed or lock-down was not a relevant factor (we already had APIs for bulk data). The resistance to the "export" button was motivated by a genuine curiosity as to why someone would want to do that, and to better understand their use case. If someone is exporting something, it's because they want to do something that we do not do. The resistance was not about letting go of control of the data, but rather losing sight of what our users wanted.
onion2k 7y ago
The article is aimed at designers.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  UI and UX designers. Who are in charge of what buttons are where, and have a significant say in whether any given button even exists.
- stefan_ 7y ago
  Well, yes. There is a lesson here: if you don't know what half the buttons do, don't write a 10 page creed about how "less is more".
kzrdude 7y ago
Since tan was the example, we could remove cosine and tangent, and leave only sine, since the others can be computed from sine easily. It will be enough in a pinch. tan x = sin x / cos x cos x = sin π/2 - x
- alxlaz 7y ago
  I mean, since we're here already, we could remove those as well, as they can be approximated with sufficient precision using Taylor series.
  - garganzol 7y ago
    And once we are here, we can remove multiplication as it can be sufficiently approximated by a plus operator. This will make the UI cleaner and UX neater. Do not listen to those pesky customers who whine they have to press "+" button lots of times.
    - OJFord 7y ago
      And is not + just a mere shortcut for typing a larger number?
  - kzrdude 7y ago
    :) I think it's a quite an innovation to have automatic sine tables or whatever the button could be described as, and that the sine button is indispensable - if you do geometry or similar.
LukeShu 7y ago
There are 2 separate dedicated buttons for log_e and log_10. Why can't we get a single general log_x button!? I'm tired of having to type log(y)/log(x) instead of log_x(y).
- dingo_bat 7y ago
  Any proper scientific calculator also has a dedicated logx button.
  - LukeShu 7y ago
    Would you care to recommend one? Causally browsing for scientific calculators, the overwhelming majority seem to not have a logx button.
    - dingo_bat 7y ago
      https://www.amazon.in/Casio-FX-991ES-Plus-Scientific-Calculator/dp/B0034BAQS8 https://www.amazon.in/Casio-FX-991ES-Plus-Scientific-Calcula... I used this one for my BE in electronics. Casio 991es. If you look at the button just below the ON button, that is the logx function.
amelius 7y ago
Regarding the calculator, I really loved those credit-card sized calculators of the 80s but I rarely see them anymore. Also, I'm curious what a modern credit-card sized device would be capable of.
- mkr-hn 7y ago
  All their circuitry was purpose-designed for the specific things the calculator did. That's why room light was enough to power them. Something more complicated would lose many of the benefits (tiny general purpose CPU) or be expensive and unreliable (big, complex circuits).
  - NikkiA 7y ago
    Modern microcontrollers can run on a fraction (uA range) of the power that those 80s credit card calculators ran on (mA range), and still have millions of times more powerful processing abilities.
- jpereira 7y ago
  Check out the Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators [0]! They're credit card sized electronic instruments. They've managed to fit a full fledged sampler in the PO-33 and a voice synthesizer in PO-35. The others aren't as processing intense but still have really powerful patterning and sounds. All running off of 2 AAA batteries, with months of battery life. [0] https://teenage.engineering/products/po https://teenage.engineering/products/po
tyingq 7y ago
The windows calculator has a decent compromise where you have to specifically change to the advanced mode and the UI exposes the other buttons. Hard to apply that to a physical calculator I suppose.
- Faark 7y ago
  Windows calculator is annoying me. I've frequently have to switch to and from programmer. It's not powerful enough to do anything useful, but can convert between number systems. But any switch clears the current input. And certainly doesn't move data over if I've already did a calculation or (, more often then I'd like to admit,) already inputted a number before noticing what mode I'm in. Another issue is hotkeys... sure, there is a way to switch between planes by keyboard. But the dumbed-down interface for mobile just doesn't provide any way to tell you.

jeswin 7y ago

I skimmed the article and closed it when I saw the Scientific Calculator being shown as an example of complexity. Most people would stop using it if a "UX Designer" tried to simplify it. Not everything is a todo list app with rounded corners.

Damogran6 7y ago
I hope you didn't miss the overall message for one poorly articulated example, then. Because there was an informative point put forth.
- mosselman 7y ago
  There might have been, but not a very original one at that. Why waste your time on an article written by someone who doesn't grasp the material fully?
- rq1 7y ago
  This example made the point unbeknownst to the author. This Dieter Rams mantra is a recurring theme. What do you think about cockpits interfaces and Bloomberg terminals? Should we add some more “white spaces”? Prioritising information/functionality does not mean sacrificing their density.
  - Damogran6 7y ago
    I think some things can be easy and some things must trade low learning curve for functionality. I highly doubt Airbus will produce a commercial airliner with a big red “fly to destination” button. (Though I’ve been wrong before)
  - bch 7y ago
    I think your comment points out “context matters”. Cockpits aren’t consumer goods.
    - kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
      Yes but most consumers aren't uneducated idiots, and for the purposes of this discussion, there is nothing that specific about a cockpit that can't be true for a scientific calculator or an audio console. This attitude is how you get Macbook "Professional"s whose keyboards stop working in 2 months.
  - meerita 7y ago
    Indeed. As a designer, I've seen 3000 DR articles. It's a pity designers abuse DR work just to justify their hedonisms. All apps I've seen with DR style have failed. I remember a bizarre podcast app for iOS in 2012 that was like insane DR nightmare and it was pleasant to eyes, but completely useless and utterly boring. It died against other options who were using generic iOS components. DR has born in another era of product design: most products had 1 or 2 features max. There were no playlists, no sharing, no connectivity, etc. It's easy to design when you have only those contraints.
atoav 7y ago
But there is a tension between badly implemented feature-rich solutions and well implemented special solutions and very often the specialized solution is much much better than anything else if it fits your usage. I work with modular synthesizers and I certainly would use a well designed interface that knows it’s priorities over one that tries to make every parameter accessible and doesn’t priorize them in any way. If all you want in a car radio is a USB charger and a volume control, a radio with just these two implemented in a deluxe variant (big knob with motor potentiometer?) would be better than say a super duper feature rich car radio that can do everything but hides it behind obscure button combinations and plastic encoders. These complex all purpose devices of course also have their use cases. But very rarely any single user will need more than the most basic stuff. Where it get’s dangerous, is when the general purpose device forgets to design these “90% of the time” use cases properly. So if you scientific calculator design makes it harder to do basic arithmetic, it is probably bad design. On the other hand if you leave out key scientific functionality because you want it to look sleek, it is also bad design. Good design has to be based on real world usage and this is a very case-by-case thing. In the end we need to accept that it is hard to cover all use cases with one interface in a good way — so just make a more than one and let users switch.
- mark-r 7y ago
  I once had a car where I wanted to upgrade the stereo. Never did it, because the station buttons on the replacements were all too small.
tobr 7y ago
> Most people would stop using it if a "UX Designer" tried to simplify it. That’s true, I completely stopped using this type of calculator when the UX designers behind Calca, Soulver and their ilk came up with a much simpler and better design.
- msla 7y ago
  The better design for a scientific calculator is Maxima, or some other keyboard-driven system where the primary UI is a command line. Why? Because you're communicating information-dense messages (equations, arithmetic problems, functions) and text remains the only way we have to do that. The command line is also the least discoverable UI imaginable. It has absolutely no obvious affordances beyond typing something into it and hoping you typed something the program understood. Even the error messages are going to be opaque unless you have some prior knowledge. There is no "just pick it up and go" with this. On the gripping hand, however, a command line is the most fluent UI short of the Emacs/ITS affinity for keystroke bindings. Once you know how to do something, you can get amazingly fast. It actively rewards muscle memory and familiarity, as opposed to menus and progressive disclosure, which are precisely as clunky on day one thousand as they are on day one. Speaking as an HP-48GX owner, a good button array with shift keys and some context-dependent buttons can be nearly as fast as a command line, but it's inherently more limited. My point is this: Discoverability is in tension with fluency, meaning that designing for experts is inherently different for designing for newbies, or people who use the software so rarely they're effectively always newbies. Removing functionality to unclutter an interface is newbie design thinking, as a command line is never cluttered. (Which isn't to say you can't do both. The Emacs GUI is newbie-friendly unless a newbie is in the habit of jamming odd key combinations at random.)
  - strokirk 7y ago
    There's certainly big differences in command line apps and terminals though. Features like tab completion with inline docstrings, fish-style autocomplete, history with search-as-you-type, infinite scrollback, semantic colors, consistent interfaces, good help pages, dry-running and more all help to increase ease of use, discoverability and quicken the learning curve.
Aeolun 7y ago
A lot of applications would be a lot better if all their functionality could be covered in one page with a bunch of buttons.
meerita 7y ago
I agree. If any UX Designer thinks that SC are badly designed let them do one and let us figure out how good is their approach. 99.9% of failure for sure. Years and years of iterations on calculators can't be that wrong. But some designers love to write hedonist articles.

alpaca128 7y ago

Not to mention that even if some features(or buttons) are unnecessarily removed it's often the wrong ones, and all that's left is a nonfunctional mess. One of the most extreme examples I encountered was the OneDrive app preinstalled on Windows 8 which had basically no options at all, no features except clicking on files to open them, and couldn't even show how much storage was still available. Minimalism just for the sake of it doesn't end well.

inapis 7y ago
Isn't the removal of "wrong" stuff more as a consequence of business decision to pursue the masses and thus you optimize or develop for the lowest common denominator? I don't think any company has ever straddled this line well especially if it's market overlaps between mainstream and power users. Ofc, I mean this is in a general way. The Onedrive example you gave is actually very extreme.

galfarragem 7y ago

Great products do what is relevant, but better. Tools should be as simple as they can but stop there. E.g. Despite my background in design I find Bulk Rename Utility UX - regarding its market target - really effective even if it's ugly. https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/assets/img-bru/mainscr.png https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/assets/img-bru/mainscr.p...

speedplane 7y ago
> Great products do what is relevant, but better. I once got into an argument with someone (not a designer) about adding an "export" feature to a table UI. It was an easy feature to add, but the argument against it was that it was yet another rarely used button, that further crowded the UI. And further, users shouldn't need to export because they should be able to do everything they needed from within the app. I was sympathetic to these arguments, especially the second. But many customers repeatedly asked for the export feature. We spoke to several and explained they could do what they needed without exporting, but even after that, they still wanted a "file" they could manipulate. I won, and we added the export feature, and many other smallish features like it. Even though I love a minimalist design and look and feel, it shouldn't come at the expense of features. And in the end, our designers made it unobtrusive and kept it elegant. Good design is not about deconstructing things just for simplicity's sake, but to expose the complexity in a way that feels natural.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > And further, users shouldn't need to export because they should be able to do everything they needed from within the app. That's just greed and extreme entitlement dressed in UX clothes. Your software will never be good enough to suffice for all use cases within a domain; most likely it isn't even particularly ergonomic for bulk of them. Often, the output of your software is needed as input to another piece of software. That's why interoperability is so important, and lack of it is a black mark.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    >> And further, users shouldn't need to export because they should be able to do everything they needed from within the app. > That's just greed and extreme entitlement dressed in UX clothes. I understand the passion here, especially today, users should be able to control data the way the want. However, greed or lock-down was not a relevant factor (we already had APIs for bulk data). The resistance to the "export" button was motivated by a genuine curiosity as to why someone would want to do that, and to better understand their use case. If someone is exporting something, it's because they want to do something that we do not do. The resistance was not about letting go of control of the data, but rather losing sight of what our users wanted.

onion2k 7y ago

The article is aimed at designers.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
UI and UX designers. Who are in charge of what buttons are where, and have a significant say in whether any given button even exists.
stefan_ 7y ago
Well, yes. There is a lesson here: if you don't know what half the buttons do, don't write a 10 page creed about how "less is more".

kzrdude 7y ago

Since tan was the example, we could remove cosine and tangent, and leave only sine, since the others can be computed from sine easily. It will be enough in a pinch. tan x = sin x / cos x cos x = sin π/2 - x

alxlaz 7y ago
I mean, since we're here already, we could remove those as well, as they can be approximated with sufficient precision using Taylor series.
- garganzol 7y ago
  And once we are here, we can remove multiplication as it can be sufficiently approximated by a plus operator. This will make the UI cleaner and UX neater. Do not listen to those pesky customers who whine they have to press "+" button lots of times.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    And is not + just a mere shortcut for typing a larger number?
- kzrdude 7y ago
  :) I think it's a quite an innovation to have automatic sine tables or whatever the button could be described as, and that the sine button is indispensable - if you do geometry or similar.

LukeShu 7y ago

There are 2 separate dedicated buttons for log_e and log_10. Why can't we get a single general log_x button!? I'm tired of having to type log(y)/log(x) instead of log_x(y).

dingo_bat 7y ago
Any proper scientific calculator also has a dedicated logx button.
- LukeShu 7y ago
  Would you care to recommend one? Causally browsing for scientific calculators, the overwhelming majority seem to not have a logx button.
  - dingo_bat 7y ago
    https://www.amazon.in/Casio-FX-991ES-Plus-Scientific-Calculator/dp/B0034BAQS8 https://www.amazon.in/Casio-FX-991ES-Plus-Scientific-Calcula... I used this one for my BE in electronics. Casio 991es. If you look at the button just below the ON button, that is the logx function.

amelius 7y ago

Regarding the calculator, I really loved those credit-card sized calculators of the 80s but I rarely see them anymore. Also, I'm curious what a modern credit-card sized device would be capable of.

mkr-hn 7y ago
All their circuitry was purpose-designed for the specific things the calculator did. That's why room light was enough to power them. Something more complicated would lose many of the benefits (tiny general purpose CPU) or be expensive and unreliable (big, complex circuits).
- NikkiA 7y ago
  Modern microcontrollers can run on a fraction (uA range) of the power that those 80s credit card calculators ran on (mA range), and still have millions of times more powerful processing abilities.
jpereira 7y ago
Check out the Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators [0]! They're credit card sized electronic instruments. They've managed to fit a full fledged sampler in the PO-33 and a voice synthesizer in PO-35. The others aren't as processing intense but still have really powerful patterning and sounds. All running off of 2 AAA batteries, with months of battery life. [0] https://teenage.engineering/products/po https://teenage.engineering/products/po

tyingq 7y ago

The windows calculator has a decent compromise where you have to specifically change to the advanced mode and the UI exposes the other buttons. Hard to apply that to a physical calculator I suppose.

Faark 7y ago
Windows calculator is annoying me. I've frequently have to switch to and from programmer. It's not powerful enough to do anything useful, but can convert between number systems. But any switch clears the current input. And certainly doesn't move data over if I've already did a calculation or (, more often then I'd like to admit,) already inputted a number before noticing what mode I'm in. Another issue is hotkeys... sure, there is a way to switch between planes by keyboard. But the dumbed-down interface for mobile just doesn't provide any way to tell you.