Day 4 of 100: A Simple Calculator App
UI design challenge with context and a process.
Wow, welcome to Day 4 of my 100 days UI challenge. Today’s design is a simple calculator and I trust you will enjoy it as usual. Today’s challenge was more of wearing the creative heart in designing a calculator screen for any platform — I chose to design for Android mobile.
Incase you have not seen previous posts:
- Day 1: Day 1 of 100: A minimal, easy to complete sign up form for Jumia.com
- Day 2: Day 2 of 100: Card checkout UX flow — from Diamond bank online to Interswitch WebPay Platform
- Day 3: Day 3 of 100: Landing page that engages — A Wakanow case study
Inspiration ?
I scanned through dribbble to see what fellow designers have created, employing their whole creative self.. I also spent sometime looking at the Android built in calculator on my device. I scanned through lots of calculator apps just to know what stood out in their designs.
I was able to ask myself “Why are Calculator screen digits right aligned?”
Yeah, it puzzled me, I Googled it and found out from this UX-stack exchange link that
Screen digits are right aligned to maintain positional consistency between what a number represents (in base 10 that would be units, tens, hundreds, etc.).
E.g. If I were to have 764 and then multiply it by 24, the answer would be 18336. By aligning to the right I’ve consistently seen the same unit representation in the same position, and when I’ve had new units (the 1 and 8 in 18336), they have appeared in a new position.
It also allows there to be a consistent alignment between character groupings (typically every 1000, but in some cases 100s and 10,000s)
I was satisfied with today’s UI just because I asked a question that puzzled me,
I did some quick sketches
And chose the one at the bottom right.
And came up with this
Thank you so much for reaching the end of this article. Your feedback will be highly appreciated and please don’t forget to “recommend” and “share” the article if it made sense to you.
I am already looking forward to Day 5 which promises to be super. #shalom
