This is quite long, but I'm posting it anyway, because I think there is a bigger picture than the one Derek paints. The quoted article posits a better design for calculators, with the implication of likely improvements in their usability, and concomitant knock-on effects on numeracy.
The problem is, designing better calculators is easy compared with *making* better calculators. But what real purpose does any detailed design work serve, if there isn't a hope that someone will actually use it? Usability research doesn't exist in a vacuum; without the reasonable likelihood that products *will* actually be made more usable, who cares how usable they *could* be? Glossing over, or ignoring, economic realities while researching better product design doesn't seem terribly useful to me. And the thing is, it's hard to choose a piece of technology less likely to bear improvement than the humble calculator. On Tue, 2005-06-28 at 15:35 +0100, Derek M Jones wrote: > The example given: "... 4 x -5 is, people tend to key in 4 x - 5, and > so end up with the result -1." Several calculators I have tried work > this way, but isn't that intentional? Only insofar as it's how poorly designed calculators happen to work; a lot of design features like this are accidental rather than deliberate. > Somebody accidently hits the wrong > key, then presses the correct one and gets the expected answer. > 4 x (-5) delivers the expected result. The trick is knowing that you got the wrong answer the first time, especially if you're under 30, or if you don't have an inherent sense of how numbers work. But I repeat myself. > I thought the design aim of calculators was to make it easy for > people to solve the kind of problems that commonly occur (ie, easy > problems)? Actually, Derek, it's not clear that there is a "design aim" for calculators any more. The majority of interesting calculator R&D was done before 1990, and pretty much every calculator now available has a design that hasn't evolved in nearly two decades, while the world has whistled on. Note that this is *not* because the designers didn't know how to press forward with better ideas; many of the usability improvements in the Thimbleby papers were on the minds of calculator designers a generation ago. I know, because I was there and I saw their whiteboards. As a former HP calculator developer, I know that calculator design is in a parlous state. I also have the confidence that, in common with many ex-calculator designers of old, I could sit down and design a substantially more usable and effective calculator than any available today. It would be implementable on modern hardware while handling all the frustrating and surprising corner-cases where simple arithmetic goes all non-linear on you. It would feel right in the hand and in the head. But I won't do it, because it would be a waste of time. Why? Because no-one would make it, since the current horrible devices are unfortunately good enough for most people, and those of us who want better would turn to our computers rather than pay the $500 price tag. Skimming the papers available on the linked site, it seems to me that the goals are to develop pedagogical gadgets for school maths classes, and to "fix" wildly out-dated calculator user interfaces, thus avoiding the inevitable financial disasters and plane crashes caused when the innumerati meet the unusabli. The first is certainly a laudable aim, and indeed one that's not lost on major calculator makers. For example, Casio are still valiantly promoting their 'ClassPad' system for teaching: http://classpad.net/ And HP nearly brought a product to market several years ago, the Math Xpander, that let students play with graphs and equations in interesting ways: http://www.hpmuseum.org/xpand.htm [A version of its software can be downloaded from here: http://www.saltire.com/xpander.html ] But I'm afraid fixing calculator design generally is right up there with improving the QWERTY keyboard or musical notation; very easy to demo, very hard to do. HP led the world in calculator design from the 1970s to the early 1990s, before beginning the maddening process of frittering away everything they knew for a buck. HP now outsources the design of its machines along with their production; their calculator division was booted out in favour of inkjet printer cartridges. Once over 1,000 people, it could now fit into a Starbucks. HP's top-selling calculator, the 12C, has been selling continuously with an unchanged design since 1981, predating the Apple Macintosh, the Falklands War, and Britney Spears. Their recent attempt to revamp it actually made it less usable, less reliable and more expensive, because the people who could design such things are now at Texas Instruments, or making hats, or buried. So, here's the $64K question that these research papers beg: with all the zillions of calculators being sold, how come only academics seem to be doing new calculator design any more? Why are all the models you can buy warmed-up leftovers from the Reagan Administration, with more RAM, less dependability and Day-glo buttons? Based on my own efforts to create a business plan around new calculator-like devices a year or two ago, the overwhelming reason seems to be that the business case for designing new calculators of almost *any* kind no longer works. (And those that I think might work require more millions to try out than I have lying around.) One of HP's major investments was in writing robust, reliable numeric libraries that squared the intersecting circles of consistency, repeatability, accuracy, precision, correctness, size and time-to-execute on a machine with as much power as the static in nylon shorts. Such libraries are as big a part of "the magic of making the discrete look continuous" as a slick user interface is, because there are a semi- infinite number of capability/interface trade-offs in calculator implementation, due to the physical and logical constraints of devices that fit in the hand. Making a good calculator is a surprisingly hard task, and pretty much all the current machines tread on hard-earned wisdom from a generation ago. But expensive as it is, the design isn't the real money pit; actually manufacturing them, creating and maintaining channels to market, and chasing competitors into the financial basement is where the *real* shirts get lost. Old-time calculator buyers were professionals who had to choose between a calculator, a slide rule and a Commodore PET. That supported a lot of high- margin spending, and bankrolled calculator design for twenty years. It also made sure that designs were done for educated people who didn't need their hands held when moving terms around in equations. But these people have all moved on to PCs, PDAs and other zippy computing doodads; the high-end market is gone, and that paid for the rest. With few exceptions, today's calculator buyers are now school-kids going through the painful transition from mathlessness to mathophobia. By their nature, they don't buy multi-hundred dollar items for "doing sums", because they go through gadgets like a horse goes through hedges. To add insult, most non-trivial calculator designs are banned by examination boards, thus promoting design stagnation over freshness. The rest of the market are people who want something to reassure themselves that 20+2 really is 22; that's now done by almost every gadget worth more than a bucket of sand. Such people rarely have to worry about multiplying by -5, because they can't buy -5 apples at Sainsburys. And when they do worry about it, the same lousy interface is available on calculators in their phone, their computer, their PDA, and their calculators proper. These factors have hammered the calculator market down to stagnant, throw-away devices, with consequently thrown-away profits; it's become yesterday's business. The cost of bringing a new calculator to market today is such that no existing maker will spend a cent of any colour on original design work, because the knock-on effects, through their manufacturing chain to the customer, leave no hope that the investment will be recouped before the CEO is fired. Instead, they make the buttons from this year's colour, shave more plastic from the case, and send them off to Wal-Mart with sheet-of-paper manuals in lilting Engrish. And companies with the resources to enter the market run screaming from the three-dollar competition that hangs glued onto cards by the checkout. So, much as I sympathize with the Thimblebys' desire to make calculators better, I fear that few will ultimately benefit from these better calculators, because I believe manufacturers are all fresh out of shirts to lose, most calculator buyers expect them to work in a certain crappy way, and we don't have any $10 general-purpose touchscreen computers we can co-opt to change their minds. While Derek is concerned about ignoring common cases, I'm concerned about massive effort being put into something that will run on any handy multimedia classroom, but is not likely ever to improve the gadget in little Johnny's hand, where it might actually make a real difference. And I wonder about the point of doing research on product designs that are economically unrealistic to change. It's not often that I hope I'm wrong; modern calculators suck rocks through a 15.24m hose, and I do wish they could be good again. -- Frank Wales [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
