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I see a lot of people discuss the order of buttons (e.g., should OK be on the left and cancel on the right? or submit button on the left or right?) but something that I wonder:

Why do volume controls place the down button on the left and the up button on the right?

I'm mostly interested in the horizontal button placement, not the more popular vertical placement.

tv remote with left/right down/up

Where this becomes problematic for me, is in my car. I always press the opposite volume button than what I am expecting/wanting!

steering wheel volume controls

On my steering wheel, the top row is the volume control and the bottom row is for cycling through stations/CD tracks.

Every volume slider I have seen also has less volume on the left and more volume on the right.

youtube volume slider

Why not place the up-volume button on the left?

Is this just because someone made this design choice a long time ago and it stuck? Are horizontal controls actually bad and they should be vertical? Do our brains intuitively think left is down or decreasing?

My left thumb sure doesn't understand.

For the record, I am left-handed.

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Austin Henley
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    Because 0 < 100. In the western world, we read left to right, and it would only make sense for our volume control to follow that same methodology. The same is true with vertical volume as well (we read up to down, left to right). – Jeremy Boyd Feb 26 '14 at 21:50
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    My question is, why would you put the up-volume button on the left? I can't think of a single situation (not just in volume, but in anything I can think of) where "more" is on the left, ans "less" is on the right. – JHixson Feb 26 '14 at 22:16
  • @JHixson Like I said, I often press the opposite button. Seems like a good reason to me! – Austin Henley Feb 26 '14 at 22:26
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    I found some research when answering a related question that is relevant here. – Charles Wesley Feb 26 '14 at 22:34
  • I fail to understand why it would make sense to put it the other way around. We read alphabetically, and I can't think of any other reason why it would be reversed. – Keavon Feb 27 '14 at 03:18
  • @Keavon This isn't reading or anything alphabetical. – Austin Henley Feb 27 '14 at 03:22
  • @AustinHenley Regardless, I still fail to understand why it would the the opposite. In asking this, are you simply asking why this order was chosen? Or are you stating the other way feels more obvious and then wondering why the reverse is the standard? – Keavon Feb 27 '14 at 03:25
  • @Keavon If you read my question, I asked both why it is the way it is and why not the other way. Your failure to understand is independent of my question (although I don't understand it either, which is why I asked.). – Austin Henley Feb 27 '14 at 03:29
  • Sorry I somehow missed the text above the picture of the steering wheel. Either way, station up is near volume up and station down is near volume down. I'd have to use the steering wheel to feel it though. – Keavon Feb 27 '14 at 04:05
  • When dealing with handedness, there is a bias for supinate to mean more, so you are right that 'outer' seems like 'more' to your brain. I can't tell you how many times I have grabbed a volume knob with my left hand and turned it the wrong way. You didn't protest that the upward-pointing "next station" arrow is on the right, so would you switch that also? One solution is to make the interface switchable, like how Windows lets you swap the mouse buttons. But this is most likely going to be confusing for everyone. Get used to it. –  May 23 '17 at 13:22

5 Answers5

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Every answer so far is way too far fetched in my opinion. The answer is in fact very simple.

enter image description here

In which direction do we turn the big wheel when we want to turn down the volume? And in which direction when we want to turn up the volume? Even when the UI does not have any indication such as on the great piece of hardware pictured above, nobody will have a problem telling which direction to turn.

It is a convention that turning a wheel to the left (i.e. counter clock wise) means LESS and to the right (i.e. clock wise) means MORE. Compare it with a screwdriver, a clock, a heating system,... Why this is? Have a read here. But it's not important since it is a fact anyway.

So if you are designing a remote control with pushbuttons for volume adjustment, it is more natural to put "less" to the left, and "more" to the right than the other way around.

This being said... It is more natural to put the "volume up" button above the "volume down" button like the great people from Cambridge Audio knew when they designed the remote for their machine.

(People from Pioneer, take notes, because your remote is awful).

enter image description here

Bart Gijssens
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My brain immediately processed it alphabetically with down coming before up.

After thinking about it though, it could simply be that it's number line based:

(Left) Down <---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---> Up (Right)
               -5  -4  -3  -2  -1   0   1   2   3   4   5
Code Maverick
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    That seems counterintuitive to me. Does my brain really process the first letter of the word when thinking about an action? – Austin Henley Feb 26 '14 at 21:52
  • I don't know about yours, but mine did. =D – Code Maverick Feb 26 '14 at 21:53
  • @AustinHenley If you really want to know the answer to that, I reccomend reading this http://www.spritzinc.com/the-science/#. When it comes to reading, you take in and parse whole words as a single unit, but you then stream each word one by one to be processed as a thought, with the thought string being cut off once you hit a closing punctuation. – JHixson Feb 26 '14 at 22:07
  • @JHixson No, that is about reading. We aren't talking about reading. – Austin Henley Feb 26 '14 at 22:09
  • @CodeMaverick Wouldn't you think it is more similar to a simple number line rather than a timeline? not that there is a huge difference between the two, but I think we tend to think about numbers in terms of number lines. – JHixson Feb 26 '14 at 22:11
  • @JHixson - Yea, that's what I meant, just used the wrong term. I'll update. – Code Maverick Feb 26 '14 at 22:11
  • @AustinHenley Ah, I see what you meant now. – JHixson Feb 26 '14 at 22:12
  • @JHixson - There I updated my diagram to be a tad more clear as well. – Code Maverick Feb 26 '14 at 22:13
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    @CodeMaverick This doesn't answer my question, this is another example. The number line could just as easily be drawn so that right is decreasing. – Austin Henley Feb 26 '14 at 22:39
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    @AustinHenley - It could be drawn that way, but it's not taught that way. Do you have a source that shows where number lines are taught to be drawn in the opposite direction? – Code Maverick Feb 26 '14 at 22:48
  • @CodeMaverick You weren't taught that way. Next time I teach a math course, I will invite you. :) – Austin Henley Feb 26 '14 at 22:51
  • @AustinHenley - Of course I was. Wikipedia even states as much: The number line is usually represented as being horizontal. Customarily, positive numbers lie on the right side of zero, and negative numbers lie on the left side of zero. So does Math Is Fun. – Code Maverick Feb 26 '14 at 22:54
  • @CodeMaverick Yes, it is usually like that. My question is why. – Austin Henley Feb 26 '14 at 22:56
  • @AustinHenley - Because that's math. Blame Apollonius and Rene Descartes. – Code Maverick Feb 26 '14 at 23:03
  • @CodeMaverick No, math allows you to rotate on an axis. Left and right is relative. – Austin Henley Feb 26 '14 at 23:06
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    @AustinHenley - You could rotate the y-axis, but, by default, it's not rotated that way; default is such that negative numbers run away from zero to the left and positive numbers run away from zero to the right. Order of operations follow left to right as well. – Code Maverick Feb 26 '14 at 23:16
  • @CodeMaverick I would argue there is no default. This is a man-made concept. Just because someone wrote it down that way doesn't make it correct or better. – Austin Henley Feb 26 '14 at 23:19
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    @AustinHenley - I would argue that it is the default due to the fact that we live in a right-handed world with most everything being thought of in left-to-right terms. With you being left-handed, you are in the minority with the other ~10% of world's population and we simply just don't have much that caters to the right-to-left thinkers unfortunately. – Code Maverick Feb 26 '14 at 23:25
  • The alphabet is really not involved here. In some countries they speak languages in which the word for down would actually come alphabetically after the word for up. Yet in those countries, less volume is still the left button. – Bart Gijssens Feb 27 '14 at 14:37
  • @BartGijssens - Hence the latter part of my answer. – Code Maverick Feb 27 '14 at 14:39
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    I wish I could up vote a comment chain. :) – Nicholas Pappas Feb 27 '14 at 21:55
  • @EvilClosetMonkey - I know right?! – Code Maverick Feb 27 '14 at 22:19
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Good question! I'd say this is a two-fold answer.

First, as others mentioned, in the western world we read left to right, so the right-side is subconsciously greater than the left-side.

But where does this come from? The second part to this equation I believe comes from psychology of design. While studying design, I learned there is always a tendency for any layout to appear to push from left to right.

So if movement is left-to-right, then it can be interpreted that going forward is left-to-right, and going forward is a positive direction, so that equals "plus" or "increase".

Now since this pattern has become popular and ubiquitous, I can only imagine that it's further enforced by our brains. I imagine a volume-up direction from right-to-left just wouldn't look correct to me. It totally could be if it was the first one I've ever seen, yet my experience of what I've come to expect subconsciously would tell me that right-to-left would be wrong.

I'm wondering, might the OP - Austin - be left-handed? Does this design pattern affect your intuition with other controls as well, or just the steering wheel? If just the steering wheel, I'd guess its because your thumb needs to travel farther to get to that volume-up buttom. Perhaps a poor ergonomics choice on the car designers' part?

jpostdesign
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  • Aha, I meant to point this out: I am left-handed and these controls are only accessible by my left hand. However, like many other lefties I have learned to operate most things using either both hands or my right hand (so I think it is just the steering wheel). – Austin Henley Feb 26 '14 at 22:21
  • Maybe the reason why you get it wrong on the steering wheel is because up is further away from the hand while down is closer. Pushing something away from you should intuitively have a decreasing effect. If the volume buttons had been controlled by the right hand the position of the buttons would probably make more sense. – Josef Engelfrost Feb 27 '14 at 23:00
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One explanation could be:

  • We have been conditioned for right meaning 'go' or 'increase' case in point - accelerator and break pedals in a car with manual transmission or traffic lights. (below)

enter image description here enter image description here

IronBasset
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    Horizontal traffic lights exist!? FWIW, the order of those lights actually irks me somewhat. I think it's because I don't parse them as: "Stopped, Slow, Moving" (states), but as "Stop, Slow Down, Go" (actions/changes of state); so it feels out of order ("You can't slow down AFTER you stop!") – Chris O'Kelly Feb 27 '14 at 03:00
  • @ChrisO'Kelly it changes from Go to Slow to Stop, right to left, just as you would expect. Then it changes from Stop to Go, left to right, just as you would expect. –  May 23 '17 at 13:27
  • @no comprende: Someone who hasn't grown up with horizontal traffic lights doesn't have any expectations regarding them. A colourblind European person driving in the US will be confused if noone has told them about this. – gpvos Jul 02 '17 at 15:33
  • @gpvos If you have no expectations you will be confused no matter what. If your expectations are not met you will be confused. Expectations are a heuristic that makes life easier, when they are correct. No one has yet solved the problem of providing perfect knowledge in advance of when it is needed. –  Jul 02 '17 at 16:58
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We in the western world naturally perceive horizontal progression as being from left to right (left is less and right is more). Thus, a button that represents more of something is more commonly placed to the right of a button that represents less of something.

As mentioned, this conditioning comes from our written languages.

Austin, I think that part of your confusion comes from visualizing volume adjustment as being a vertical slider even when the buttons are horizontally aligned, and hence you tellingly refer to "Up" and "Down" buttons instead of "Increase" and "Decrease" buttons.

The fact that your car's "More" and "Less" buttons actually resemble up- or down-pointing arrows certainly don't help. The only thing that I can say is that Plus and Minus symbols are less ambiguous than arrows.

Tim Huynh
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  • The notion that I "naturally perceive" a left->right progression as less->more because I grew up in the western world, and because of the way I read seems suspicious at best. Do you have any studies looking at this supposed phenomenon? – Nicholas Pappas Feb 27 '14 at 20:17
  • I don't have studies but I think it's self-evident. By "naturally perceive" I mean as a result of conditioning that's reinforced over years and years of reading (from early childhood for most people) and from visual cues in the physical and digital world (progress bars, sliders). I didn't meant that it's evolutionary inherent. – Tim Huynh Feb 27 '14 at 20:54
  • To pin any human behavior as "self-evident" is a dangerous proposition. – Nicholas Pappas Feb 27 '14 at 21:03
  • @EvilClosetMonkey I know I've heard of at least one study showing a relationship between reading direction and seemingly unrelated perceptions and habits. Doing a Google Scholar search for 'reading direction' turns up a couple of these. (I have a professor who would be able to find better studies, if you want me to ask him.) – Tanner Swett Mar 22 '14 at 23:11
  • @TannerSwett Which came first, the writing or the preference? Nevertheless, 90% of humans show up right handed. Writing simply made the choice to not smudge and block vision of what one was writing. Seems pretty self-evident to me. –  May 23 '17 at 13:30