Rechner and Designing Experiences First
In early March 2012 Rechner was released for iPhone and billed itself as “the first gesture-based calculator.” Rechner is visually stunning. It’s also visually simple, containing only: an active input/output pane similar to what we’re used to with other calculators, a small display of the current action (add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc), a simple grid of numbers and a decimal point. And an information glyph in the top left which reveals the instructions for using the app.
The design community seems to love the app. It’s beautiful. There are claims that it’s the calculator that Apple should have shipped, it’s the future, and so on.
Except the app sucks. It takes something that’s always pretty much worked (a basic calculator) and made it require an instruction manual. Swipe right to add, swipe left to subtract, but swipe down to reveal a pane which lists the functions unworthy of a gesture. Equals? Swipe up, the opposite direction of written equations. Two finger swipe in any direction to clear.
My assumption is that the app is positioned to be a basic calculator to fulfill simple back-of-the-napkin type needs. Splitting a check, adding a few numbers together, that kind of thing. Things that in Apple’s iPhone calculator app you can do with one hand and no instruction manual. Mapping gestures to existing mental models is a daunting task, but Rechner makes some generally confusing choices. Glaringly, two finger swipe right visually maps to an equals sign, but actually runs a clear function in the app.
Immersive user experiences through touch-based interfaces are extremely compelling, it’s the way things are going. Simplified, context-aware interfaces are finally beginning to permeate the mainstream. Thoughtlessly mixing the two without really exploring the problem is, as evident by Rechner, not a recipe for success.
That being said, I’m glad someone made this failure. Design is only going to get better as we get more data on what works and what doesn’t. Rechner tries to solve a problem (which arguably doesn’t exist) with an interesting solution. The team behind it obviously put a lot of work to it, at least on a visual-polish level, and perhaps misguidedly on the interaction side. Props to them for having an idea and getting it out there. For that, we’re all better off.
Foreshadowing
Looking through old photos from Cove, I found this one by Noah Kalina. The Cove team sitting in boxes. Six months before joining Dropbox. Inception.
