Today’s UI design theme is “calculator”. I didn’t have a good amount of time to make this into pretty UI, but did spend some time thinking about it.
Designing a calculator is a pretty vague task. My initial thoughts went to the most common calculators I have on my iPhone and the ones I used for school work. But, there are many different calculators for different uses. Take myself for example, I used calculators (both simple & complex formats) extensively at school to help calculate math and other problems. Now, I don’t use it that often. If I have to use it, I use it to calculate tips or how much my friend and I split expenses, or how much I spend in certain category in total for a week or something.
Other than the regular use, many professions probably have their own specialty calculators, which I have little ideas about. To make things more interesting, I also thought about calculators that can be used in different age groups, like for kids, teens or adults. I think the idea of a calculator for kids is interesting, but I would argue it’s more guided learning than calculating.
Anyway, after writing out different ideas about calculators, I landed on the idea of combining calculating tips and split expenses for a smartphone. I thought about including a regular calculator as well, but seems can’t find a way to unify the UI for the three.
Again, I didn’t have time to make things into digital, so here’s my rough idea of how it works: display numbers on the left side, and pad on the right, so that you can press number directly. Tap the corresponding screen area or the button on the right to jump to the next field. If you want to split, you can do that after the tip calculation, or split the total amount directly. As I typed, I noticed I totally forgot to draw a “Split” button that lets you do that. Well, better to pay attention to that next time.
