Product Teardown 16 — Calculators on Alcatel, Apple, Google, Smartisan and Xiaomi

In this series, I am going to write a few articles about product teardown of utility apps on smartphone, such as Calculator / Calendar /Call /Camera /Clock /Contact /File Manager /Gallery /Messaging /Music /Photo/Google Photo, etc.

These are frequently used products, but are often not given enough attention when they are being designed. My goal here is to compare and analyze these products, and then dive deep into why they design in that way and how we can improve these products.

Let start from Calculator.

Calculator is a simple app. It’s an often used app. But it’s not an app on which everybody does a good job.

First Appearance (App Icon, User Interface)

App Icon

If we take a first look at these apps, we find big different in icon design. Icons are subjective, but I think we can still say some icons are more beautiful than others.

Icon should convey the meaning of the app. It should be easy to recognize and remember. It should NOT create ambiguity or confusion.

Among all these Icons, Smartisan’s calculator is the best. Without an app name, users can still know that Smartisan is developing a calculator. Apple and Google’s are OK. Alcatel’s and Xiaomi’s are worst.

Alcatel puts a blue background under the calculator Icon. From a user’s perspective, that blue background doesn’t make any sense and is annoying. Also, Xiaomi uses “=” as a calculator icon. It doesn’t convey the meaning of the app. Without an app name, users would never know this is a calculator.

Why Alcatel and Xiaomi design their icons in such a way? I think one of the reasons is that they try to come up with something that is different from Google. Unfortunately, they failed. My suggestion would be, if you couldn’t do a better job than Google, just follow Google’s design and do not mess around it. Please!

User Interface

Alcatel / Google

Since Alcatel almost copied Google’s design, let put the together to do a comparison.

There is a side bar on the right. So users can swipe left to pull scientific calculator. I think this is a good design.

Alcatel’s calculator only has a “back button” — “x”, while Google has “DEL” as well as “CLR” which shows up after you do the calculation. Google does a better job here. Alcatel’s “back button” is not easy to use when you want to start a new calculation.

Google also has a folded button through which you can send feedback or ask for help. It’s useful but I personally think it’s annoying.

Apple / Smartisan / Xiaomi

Apple, Smartisan and Xiaomi all have clean user interface. They are doing better job than Alcatel and Google.

Features

For basic features, such as standard calculation and scientific calculation, all calculators do the job.

But there are a few features that make Xiaomi stand out

1. modify inputs. If you mistakenly put a wrong number in Apple, Google, Alcatel, Smartisan’s calculator, you would not be able to make changes. You either re-do calculation, or cancel out the effects by adding or subtracting that wrong number. But from MIUI 8, in Xiaomi’s calculator, you can modify your inputs in a multi step calculation. This is doable because of the second feature
2. remember and show every step of calculation. If you have a list of numbers, it’s easy to miss one or two during the inputting. From MIUI 8, every step is remembered and shown, so users can easily know where they are. And if they make mistakes, they can modify inputs easily.
3. Numbers changes to characters (阿拉伯数字转大写). This is a great feature targeting Chinese market. In China, if you want to write a check, you need to write both in numbers, and in characters. Many people actually don’t now how to express numbers in character. MIUI 8 makes that work very easy.

Improvement

There is always room for improvement. For Alcatel, they have a lot work to do.

1) they need to design a better app icon, or simply follow Google’s design

2) remove calculating history. it is not useful at all. Think from users’ perspective, why they need to know the history if they couldn’t change them. Or learn from MIUI 8, allow users to make changes in a multi steps calculation.

3) add a “clear” button when users finish calculation. So users can simply press the button and restart, instead of pressing “back” multiple times.

4) allow users to input a formula and get final result. This would be very useful for college students who do a lot of calculating work.

5) Calculator can be a floating window on screen. Many times, when users are viewing a webpage or reading Facebook post, they see some numbers and they want to do a quick check. They can launch calculator, start doing calculation while read the numbers in webpage or Facebook feed.

6) Add metric conversion feature for common things, such as currency($ , ￥), temperature(F, C), weight(kilo, pounds, etc), length, area, volume, speed, distance (miles, km). conversion calculator can be a very useful feature for younger users who study in college, who travel a lot, who meet people from different places of the world.