[x_section style=”margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 0 0px 0 0px; “][x_row inner_container=”true” marginless_columns=”true” bg_color=”” style=”margin: 0px auto 0px auto; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; “][x_column bg_color=”” type=”1/1″ style=”padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; “][x_custom_headline level=”h2″ looks_like=”h2″ accent=”false”]Why I redesigned the calculator[/x_custom_headline][x_text]Let me be candid: I dislike calculators. That’s why I had to invent one for myself.

By C Y Gopinath • Jun 2, 2015
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Oh, I use them like everyone else — for my supermarket calculations, my monthly expenses, quick checks on how I’m doing on the budget front.

But I’ve never liked them, not their look, not the clunky way they worked, not the mysterious glyphs I had to master.

As a designer, I was offended. That no one had asked why a 21st century smartphone calculator should look exactly like something Casio used to make in 1964. I missed elegance, simplicity, a genuinely friendly interface. I missed attention to detail, and thoughtfulness in anticipating user needs.

As a user, I was annoyed. That the average calculator was so uncommunicative, so lacking in feedback. If I was interrupted in the middle of typing, and forgot the last thing I had typed, the calculator would just stare at me impassively.

If I made a mistake in my typing, my only option was to retype it all again. There was no way to delete it.

Working with Memory was a nightmare, like playing blind man’s bluff. Not only was everything invisible, there was no quick way to check the contents of Memory.

And the plethora of memory buttons was enough to make an accountant blanch — M, M+, M–, MC, MR, MS, in one app I saw.

Worst of all, if I suddenly wanted to change or delete a number or operator I’d typed a few minutes ago — there was no chance of that.

One day I woke up and decided that I would build the kind of smartphone calculator that I would love to use.

Whom the Bell polled

It started when I stumbled across a a paper describing research the Bell Laboratories had conducted around 1964, when they were designing their early pushbutton touchtone telephones. Naturally, the design of the keypad was an important issue, and also naturally, the first place they looked was to the handheld calculators of those days.

The numbers on those were arranged in a 3×3 grid with 1-2-3 on top and 0 alone in the fourth row. Bell Labs asked their engineers to develop a range of possible keypad arrangements and tests them out with consumers. All options were on the table and the engineers came up with 18 designs.

It is a matter of historical record that the one they selected was IV-A (fourth row, leftmost) in the image alongside). Design IV-A was, curiously, was an exact vertical flip of the keypad design popular in calculators then and now, with 7-8-9 on the top row.

A popular explanation given out was that Bell Laboratories needed to slow down the typing speed to give a little time to their switching circuits to process things. A second, more plausible, explanation was that it had been picked because of ‘technical considerations’.

If you were to conclude that human beings don’t really care how numbers are arranged on their smartphones, you’d not be far wrong. Look at the numeric keypad on the Apple Calculator and the Apple Phone apps — the numeric layouts are exactly the opposite of each other. So far no one has complained.

What caught my eye in Bell Labs’ 18 other-worldly keypad designs, however, was the overlooked I-C on top row right — the nearly circular garland design. Not only had it scored a significantly shorter keying time when people used, but it had also led to a significantly lower error rate.

The redesign

I liked the garland — a circle is logical and space saving. And that’s where my redesign started. I isolated the four main arithmetic operators and placed them in a line above the garland, following Johny Ive’s typographic guidances. The = button took its place in the centre of the radial.

I added a secondary display below the main one to reflect what was being typed. In addition, I made sure that keys being typed lit up like Christmas trees. Never again did I want to forget where I was in the calculation.

I collapsed all those M’s into a single M. To add a number to memory, you just had to tap it once, and twice to subtract it. Tapping M instead would move the number from Memory to the calculation. And as for clearing Memory — why, just swipe the M with a finger in any direction.

I made sure that the contents of Memory could remain on display through a setting preference.

But my favorite feature by far is Edit History. Swipe the calculator aside to the left, and you see a generously designed page displaying all your calculations since you last pressed the C (Clear) button.

You can change anything there — numbers, operators — and even delete entire lines with an Apple left swipe. The entire result is recalculated instantly.

Why Calcuta?

My brother is a wordsmith on steroids, what can I say? When he saw what the app could do, he forbade me from calling it SuperCalc or CalcPlus or anything of that ilk.

Then, in an inspired moment, he blurted out: “Calcutta!!” Beloved city of my childhood — just one syllable short of being calculator. And so easy and distinctive to remember. To make it mine, I remove a single t from the word.

The launch version is basic. It is not a scientific calculator (yet), it does not honour algebraic precedence (yet), you cannot put things in brackets (yet). It will not convert feet into metres, or US dollars into Thai baht (yet). But an Android version is coming soon, and you can look forward to a slew of new features to be added.

Before Christmas, I promise.

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