"For all six different configurations of keysets, subjects showed an overwhelming preference for numbering arrangements in which numerals increase from left to right and from top to bottom," Chapanis recalled. The researchers asked participants to place numbers and letters on the keys according to where they thought they should be. Chapanis and Lutz tested 300 people, 150 men and 150 women, stratified in three age groups - divided evenly between persons who claimed to be either naïve or sophisticated with regard to the use of keysets. "I designed a study to determine what in human factors are called 'population stereotypes.' I wanted to find out where people expect to find numbers and letters on keys," he recalled. In the early 1990s, 10 years before his death in 2002, Chapanis reminisced about how he solved the problem of the push-button phone. Lutz was deceptively simple: What should a push-button telephone look like? To people who've never known anything but the simple 10-button grid (three rows, three columns with the 0 on the bottom the star and "pound" buttons came later as well as the letters Q and Z), the problem actually required thoughtful, systematic design and testing. The question facing Chapanis and lab assistant Mary C. Thus, its determination at the time to move from rotary dials to a push-button design would change the telephone for all users. ![]() Bell Telephone, in the days before deregulation, monopolized the industry. The late Alphonse Chapanis, PhD, PA, an industrial and human factors psychologist, took a leave of absence from his post at the Johns Hopkins University in 19 to work on the technical staff at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. ![]() Whatever happened to the rotary phone? Psychological testing helped design the ubiquitous push-button keypad for the telephone.
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