A Better Calculator

Software	Any language with good GUI facilities, or smartphone technology stack
Covers	Human Computer Interaction
Skills Required	Programming, interaction design, possibly mobile app development, mathematics
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ?? Programming ??

Brief Description

Handheld computers have been around since the 1970s. We used to call them pocket calculators. (The author of this proposal is - just - old enough to have owned a slide rule; his first calculator cost as much in real terms as a decent smartphone.) Pocket calculators are still in use, as are calculator emulators running, for instance, on PCs under Windows and smartphones under Android. And the interface hasn't changed much.

But given what we can do with computer and smartphone displays nowadays, can we do better, even for the cheap specialist gadgets that long ago rendered slide rules obsolete? Harold Thimbleby argued in his paper Calculators are needlessly bad that pocket calculators and calculator emulators offer a lousy user experience, and it ought to be possible to do a lot better.

Your task in this project is to develop a new and different calculator app running on a PC or a smartphone, and evaluate its usability by doing some systematic, rigorous user testing.

Reading

Thimbleby, H. (2000). Calculators are needlessly bad. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 52, 1031-1069. https://doi.org/10.1006/ijhc.1999.0341

Back to