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Celsius needs a redesign

Logan DeBiase
UX Collective
Published in
8 min readJun 23, 2019

“As a European, I am deeply offended by this article.” — lit comments section 😉

The bashing of Fahrenheit is readily found everywhere, while the usability concerns of Celsius are not discussed because it is a part of the sacred metric system. The metric system is great, but Celsius does not need to be a part of it. All arguments against Fahrenheit end up in the defense of the metric system. What if we could constructively criticize the Celsius scale without promoting the imperial system or attack the metric system and offer a solution?

Removing Celsius from the metric system

For this discussion, let’s separate Celsius from the metric system. Poof—it’s gone. You know why? Not all base units in the metric system interconnect with each other. Especially a temperature scale like Celsius. It’s considered miscellaneous. An entity in itself. When you reach 10°, 100°, 1,000° centigrade, nothing happens. Nobody adds kilo to their Celsius. So it’s really part of the family because they assigned some value to 0° and 100° and called it a day. They didn’t exactly crowd source this idea. And now we use it daily to describe the temperature in our environments and in our bodies.

Your precious 0°—100°C is arbitrary too

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Logan DeBiase

Lead Product Designer / Design Manager at Docusign · logandebiase.com

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