Designs that Bell Almost Used for the Layout of Telephone Buttons

What I particularly like is the fact that, from a purely data-driven perspective, the obvious choice is I-C; the rotary-mimicing layout.<p>But (I conject) the lower error rate and preference is merely down to familiarity of users with the older rotary system.<p>So the lesson, for me anyway, is that listening to your users or to your data without applying your own reasoning can easily lead you to the wrong conclusion.<p>Which is not groundbreaking, but it&#x27;s nice to have case studies.

Here is the link to the original BSTJ article.<p><a href="http://www3.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol39-1960/articles/bstj39-4-995.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www3.alcatel-lucent.com&#x2F;bstj&#x2F;vol39-1960&#x2F;articles&#x2F;bstj...</a>

This title stretches the definition of the word &quot;almost&quot;. They tested a bunch of varieties and settled on the best one. That doesn&#x27;t mean the worst of them were &quot;almost used&quot;.

I never consciously realized that the phone button layout was different than the calculator&#x2F;number-pad layout. Weird! I&#x27;m curious whether I&#x27;ve misdialed numbers because of that.

It&#x27;s really odd to me that the traditional keyboard 10-key entry pad hasn&#x27;t switched to the phone number layout. If the phone layout is more efficient and less error prone, why didn&#x27;t keyboards start with the phone layout and not the calculator layout?

It&#x27;s interesting to think about how the use of one of these alternate layouts would influence today&#x27;s phones. I wonder what the iOS&#x2F;Android phone apps would look like with a circular button layout.

This makes me wonder how many HackerNews readers have actually used a rotary phone.

I wonder how long the telephone number will be around for? Another 10 years? 100?<p>Do you think 1000 years from now we&#x27;ll still be using them?

I&#x27;m struggling to find a difference between IV-A (the winning design) and VI-A.<p>Is there a subtle difference? They look the same to me.<p>If they are the same, why would they have two identical designs?

I remember having a touch-tone phone with the buttons in the positions of the finger holes for a rotary-dial phone. I think it was supposed to look retro?

I hope that the cross pattern came with gospel sounds instead of the standard beeps.

They should have put the zero before the one.

None of these include the ABCD keys (FLASH OVERRIDE, FLASH, IMMEDIATE, &amp; PRIORITY) used by AUTOVON which started in 1963.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that all of these layouts are presented on a round background.

Book Recommendation: &quot;Design of Everyday things&quot;. A great book,and particularly covers quite a bit about telephones.<p>Surprised no one has brought this up yet. :-)

I like III-B.<p>It seems to have the least amount of finger-roam of all the layouts.<p>Yet it offers more keying discernability than VI-A owing to the tiered layout.

Based on this sheet, it looks like they decided on the layout we use but wanted testing to back it up.

Hm, IV-A and VI-A is the same?

Aren&#x27;t VI-A and IV-A the same layout?