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Just learned that flip phones always had the back button on the right on purpose, and I never noticed
I was reading a piece on old phone design last week and it mentioned that the reason the back button sat on the right side of flip phones was because most people hold them in one hand and their thumb naturally rests there. That surprised me because I always figured it was just random. I dug through a drawer and pulled out my old Samsung from around 2004, and sure enough, the button was right where my thumb landed every time. Meanwhile, I shipped a checkout screen two years ago with the back arrow on the left, and I got a handful of complaints from older users who kept hitting it by mistake. We moved it to the right on a hunch, and the complaints dried up. So did the old phone makers just know something we forgot, or is this one of those things that only works for certain handed people?
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luna_wells574d ago
Something the article probably left out is that flip phones had physical buttons with raised edges, so you could feel the back key without looking at it. That changes everything, because your thumb learns the shape and spots it by touch alone. A flat touch screen gives you nothing to feel, so the arrow ends up being pure muscle memory, and right handed people reach for the right side on autopilot. The old makers did not just guess, they had a physical layout that rewarded placing the key where the thumb sat. What bugs me is that we copied the position without copying the feel, then acted shocked when people kept missing it. The fix for your checkout was probably less about left or right and more about making that target big enough that a wrong thumb still lands on it.
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