Overdoing the interface metaphor

He's missing the point. That calculator app isn't there for him, it's there for new users.

If you sit down at a computer for the first time, and need to do a calculation, you want something that behaves exactly like you're used to - a calculator that works just like the one in your desk, a painting program that works as much like a set of paints and brushes as can be managed.

That's not 'overdoing the interface metaphor', it's being faithful to expectations. Sure, there's a better interface for the calculator available, but people that would want one generally know how to install one.

The Java interface metaphor is a telling one: an interface is a promise to the user. Changing the interface forces the user to change as well, and people seldom want to.

> As an interface designer I am often asked to design a “better” interface to some product. Usually one can be designed such that, in terms of learning time, eventual speed of operation (productivity), decreased error rates, and ease of implementation it is superior to competing or the client’s own products. Even where my proposals are seen as significant improvements, they are often rejected nonetheless on the grounds that they are not intuitive.

> It is a classic “catch 22.” The client wants something that is significantly superior to the competition. But if superior, it cannot be the same, so it must be different (typically the greater the improvement, the greater the difference). Therefore it cannot be intuitive, that is, familiar. What the client usually wants is an interface with at most marginal differences that, somehow, makes a major improvement. This can be achieved only on the rare occasions where the original interface has some major flaw that is remedied by a minor fix.

--Jef Raskin

Amusingly, the interface Marco points out as not having any real-world equivalent is actually fairly close (barring lack of keypad) to what my Casio scientific calculator does - calculation history, variable references, editing and all. The inability of most bundled calculator applications to live up to a £15 pocket calculator has been a source of frustration for me for quite some time - it's not that the calculators fail by replicating a real-world object; it's that they fail by not replicating the right one :)

It is funny, when injection molded plastics were first introduced, companies tried to make them replicate the look of knotty pine wood. Then some Italian designers got to them and showed off the intrinsic beauty of plastic (organic forms, translucence) paving the way for designs like the iMac. Seems like the same thing is happening with iPlatform apps.

I think the super literal interface metaphor is a symptom of people responding to polished aesthetics. For years designers have had to work in the handcuffs of cross browser compliance, small file sizes, and as a result most sites look boring.

Along comes the iPhone with these little app confections that are:

- single purpose: so they don't need cluttered nav and work really well

- replicating physical objects: so the metaphors generally make sense opposed to say a tag cloud

- Were made by Mac enthusiasts: Who tend to make really nice looking stuff

Now a lot of folks are thinking that the key to good apps is making it look like/replicate some real world object. While this is part of these apps appeal it is just one layer.

I think if the delicious monster/panic/icon factory teams got a hold of the calculator he was holding up as a great design it would be far more popular. It looks impressive functionally and he is right that we shouldn't be beholden to old technical constraints. It is just a boring from a UI/Eye candy POV which is important in a retail world.

His preferred calculator seems fairly close to using ipython which is what I would do.

You need to be used to typing formulas into a computer (^ and sqrt and so on) to use the non-physical calculator. Most people aren’t. Sure, it’s easy enough to learn, but the average user opens his OS calculator probably only a few times a year. He gets what he is used to and that’s probably a good idea. Slow to work with but no learning required.

If you need a calculator regularly you should probably get something different. You wouldn’t write a novel with TextEdit or WordPad.

By the way, there is a much better way to do quick and dirty calculations which doesn’t require you to fire up the Calculator. Try Spotlight. And not just simple arithmetic. Try sqrt(2) or e^2 or sin(pi/2). Good enough for my very occasional calculatory needs. So, in a way, OS X offers best of both worlds, but some bells and whistles (which you might not need anyway) may be missing.

Looking at his preferred calculator, I really see no visual cues of what functions are supported. Is it a simple calculator or does it do complex formulas. The normal OS X calculator acts like the physical object and gives the clues of a physical object. This is not to say I think the translation of a physical object is the best solution, but I really think that some better visual hints need to be given then just a blank document for new users.

The page turning Apple built seems to me the right way to go because it is simple gesture we grasp instinctively, the content is paged, and it looks good.

We can do so much better then physical objects on computers (look at the interface to many puzzle games), but it really needs to assist the new users and get out of the way of the old.

When making instacalc I had some of the same issues -- why do we emulate the existing calculator with its limitations?

I feel spreadsheets are the other extreme of interface overload -- way too much power. There's nothing in between (you get 1 editable field with calc.exe, and hundreds of thousands in Excel).

In my own usage I want to optimize the 90% use case, like an interactive "back of the envelope":

* Real-time editing & results

* Show the few calculations I care about at once (both question and answer)

* Ignore gritty programming details (does variable case matter? Do _spaces_ matter? Why can't a name be "net sales = 3")

* Make difficult conversions easy ("15 cows/day in minutes per cow").

There's always tradeoffs between familiarity & forging a new direction.

I just use the Google search-bar up over there on the right.

The only reason I can think of to make an interface that mimics a physical object is that the new interface is more likely to be instantly recognizable and intuitive to a user looking at it for the first time. In this case you're designing the interface to work best for a new user, which generally means it won't work as well for an advanced user. I would guess that designers of basic calculator apps, like the example in the post, are designing for the new or occasional user and assume that anyone doing lots of calculations will move on to something more efficient.

The problem with extending physical mimicry to more complex software is that the interface ends up adopting design compromises made for the physical world. I remember the idea of a "virtual shopping mall" where you would virtually walk through the mall, look around and pick a store to go into. But a shopping mall has to be a certain size because it has to hold a certain amount of stuff. It takes time to walk from one end of a mall to the other, but there's no reason to extend that compromise (made to gain physical space) should ever be made in software. For anything beyond a very simple application you're better off asking the user to learn a few things about how the software works and designing the interface for its medium.

Slightly off topic, but I find the Python REPL to be the best calculator out there.

Whenever I see a little Mac app that's apparently quite popular and has a price attached, I can't help wondering why nobody releases a Windows version with the same price tag.

Proven market + 20x customer base = potential success?

Note to whoever jumps on this: Do it with Omnigraffle first. I'll buy the first copy!

I noticed something about Propellerheads Reason, the old music studio program. Its interface emulates a rack of devices where you can draw cables between the ports to create a sort of modular setup. Everything is made to look like authentic hardware gear. Just like in the real world, there could only be one cable in a socket at a time, although there didn't need to be any such limitation in a software environment. Later, they kind of fixed this - by adding a separate "splitter" module which duplicates its input signal into two outputs (iirc).

Please note that Soulver is available for Mac and iPhone only and the full version is 20$.

Wholly agree with nevinera on this. That calculator is there for people who don't know another interface for calculators. Sure, there are better tools, but sometimes simplicity & mimicry are best.

For a brief side-topic, Soulver is interesting. Good in many ways, but lacking in a fair number.

For two examples, from a feature request I sent in a while ago.

1) Matrix calculation is effectively not possible, though you can fake it through massive function hacks. This means an enormous amount of the math I would've used it for simply could not be done.

2) This is a big and simple one: fractions go in, decimals come out. There's an "answers" floating palette you can pop up, but guess what. You can't select the text. Loads of useful information, and all you can do is look at it. I requested this be changed quite over a year ago (I mean, heck, why not?), but it's still the same.

Also, the last update was three years ago. Barely-developed programs frighten me.

Excellent ideas in the article. I think it's interesting that he mentions iPhone/iPad apps that emulate page turning. I remember when that was a popular fad for newspapers/magazines that were moving to the web. They all had to have fancy flash/java, whatever interfaces that emulated a magazine complete with page turning animations. It was the kind of thing that must have looked like a million bucks when demonstrating it to the CEO, but was universally hated by actual users. :-)

Other good examples from the web would be the many attempts that have been made to create web based "shopping centers" and museum interfaces that would try to recreate the experience of walking through a shopping center or museum. Of course those all failed wildly because it's a hell of a lot easier to just click on a menu than to walk down a "virtual hallway". :-)

I agree that physical metaphors are overused. Unfortunately, they sell software: http://delicious-monster.com/images/librarypage/screenshots/...

Another excellent calculator (multi-platform, too): http://www.speedcrunch.org/en_US/index.html

By default, it has a keypad, but you can turn it off easily enough.

In that Tandy Trower article about Windows, he mentions including simple apps like a calculator and what not, to show off what the UI toolkit is capable of, not necessarily as useful end-user productivity tools (though those, in the form of Write and Paint, would eventually be added).

It seems we've inherited the calculator app because that's what everyone has always done before.

Also, digital cameras do make fake shutter sounds...

Oh man that looks cool I can't wait to try it. I'm a hedge fund accountant and I would love a way to keep a trail of calculations open like that. A lot of times when I'm doing tricky Sherlock Holmes reconciliations a spreadsheet is total overkill and too confining.

Thanks for posting, swombat! New item on my TODO.

I think the guy in "The Essentials of User Interface Design" says the same thing somewhere in that book.

Since we're on the topic of calculators ...

Is there something like Soulver or Speedcrunch, but also handles unit conversions a la google calculator?

instacalc is OK, but doesn't handle units properly either.

edit: www.encalc.com seems to do units right, but allowing only one expression at a time is limiting.

Yeah great, we just needed some "dc/bc" clone in a window at 19.95$. I agree with the interface mistake, not with the product...

Use dc or bc!

The calculator app is much more intuitive than some text app for general users, just like the finder is much more intuitive than the terminal.