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Are physical buttons going extinct?

Are we leaving physical buttons behind or will they be part of our future?

Daley Wilhelm
UX Collective
8 min readOct 27, 2024

A close up shot of the new iPhone 16 camera control button.
The camera control button is the newest addition to the iPhone 16. Image from — https://www.macrumors.com/2024/09/09/iphone-16-camera-control-button/

Physical buttons were not a part of my user experience education. All interfaces that I and my classmates designed were assumed to be a part of a graphic user interface on either a touchscreen or desk top. The only time that physical buttons were discussed was in studying the past — it seems like UX design is divided between the pre- and post-touchscreen era.

A brief history of touchscreens

A timeline showing progress and adaptation of touchscreens from 1965 to 2007.

The first touchscreen’s description is credited to Eric Arthur Johnson in 1965, an engineer at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern, England. His article, later refined into the 1967 paper “Touch Displays: A Programmed Man-Machine Interface” explained how a screen could be interacted with via fingertips, rather than buttons, dials, and knobs.

A magazine ad for the HP-150, a touchscreen PC.
The “easiest-to-learn, easiest-to-use” personal computer. Image from — https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2431

The first commercially available computer with a touchscreen was the HP-150 in 1983, which sensed…

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Daley Wilhelm

A fiction writer turned UX writer dedicated to crisp copy, inclusive experiences, and humanizing tech.

Responses (12)

What are your thoughts?

I vote we bring back the retro rotary phones!

13

Great analysis! Touchscreens are indeed powerful, but buttons add irreplaceable tactile value, especially for intuitive and safe use in complex systems like cars.

13

Interesting perspective! Touchscreens are convenient, but physical buttons offer tactility. Do you think there's a middle ground?

5