UI/UX Critique: “Stacking Pencils”

I’m sure many of us remember using these stacking pencils in our childhood, but our experiences were most likely not entirely positive. Sometimes called push-point pencils, these writing devices have major design flaws that can frustrate a person of any age.

For those unfamiliar with how these pencils work: when the led runs low on the current topper, you must pop it out of the front, unscrew the back of the pencil, and pop the empty pointer in the back, which pushes all of the other refills forward, and the next refill emerges as the new pointer.

In an ideal world, there are many benefits to this stacking design. The pencils contain a good number of led refills yielding impressive longevity, the thin shape of the led dismisses the need to sharpen the pencil, and they look unique and reasonably aesthetic. However, the stacking of led refills presents a major problem in normal usage. In the process of changing out the refill pointers, or even tossing the pencil around in your bag, it’s very easy to lose a refill or two. Doing so will render the pencil completely unusable! Without even one of the starting refills, the topmost pointer will slide into the pencil casing when any pressure is applied, not allowing you to write anything. As a result, this design is very inflexible, requiring each tiny refill to be present in order to work properly.

In order to maintain usability when a refill is lost, the topmost pointer should snap in place without needing to be pushed by an exact number of refills behind it. Additionally, there could be a button located on the side of the pencil that would shift the refills forward, rather than needing to manually push them inside the pencil casing. This is shown in the sketch below.

Note how pressing the button causes the new pencil top to emerge. Because of the new snapping functionality, there is no longer a need to save the old pointers, alleviating the user’s responsibility to keep track of each piece.

There are several other issues with the “stacking pencil” that also rely on the user not losing very small pieces. First, there is a pencil cap that must be completely removed for each use. Some versions of these pencils allow the caps to snap onto the back of the pencil, but others do not support this. If they do not, it is very difficult to keep track of the cap. Second, misplacing this cap will also lose the eraser, which has a separate cap. There simply is no need to add an additional small cap for the eraser. Perhaps the designers were prioritizing keeping the eraser clean, and preventing it from falling out. However, in my experience, I lost the small eraser cap within a few minutes of use anyways.

Completely capless pencils are a norm, but I do see the issues that the designers were addressing in adding a cap to the stacking pencil. Pencils are often tossed around bags and scattered on desks, so any open lead has the chance of making marks on surrounding objects. The cap does for the stacking pencil what a pen cap does to an ink pen: provides a barrier between the mark-making point and its environment. I agree that this is a valid concern, but I’ll offer an alternative solution that combats both issues. The previously proposed button that pushes the refills forward could act as a toggling tool, where pushing it when a top refill is still snapped on would un-snap it and retract the pointer into the casing. This is a common design for pens, and would prevent the need for the easily-loseable cap. Consequently, the eraser (which was previously located on the cap) would have to be moved. I suggest that it follow traditional pencil convention and be attached to the back, without a cap.

The new design solves the major flaw in usability, needing all of the small components of the pencil to operate it. It does have a very different appearance than the original, but the main concept is preserved: the pencil acts as a case for additional pencil tops. If these proposed changes were made, the “stacking pencil” would improve its longevity and offer its users a far less frustrating experience.

*picture of pencils is from https://www.solidsmack.com/resources/toolpen/