Money Usability
Making different denominations of coins different shapes and sizes is obvious. You keep them in your pocket, wallet or change purse, and they get all mixed up. When you want to find a five cent/pent coin, you unconsciously think to look for a certain shape and size. Coins of different shapes and sized make sense.
Being from the United States, I’m used to all of my paper money being all the same size. So after I arrived in England, I had to get used to dealing with notes that are all different sizes. Like coins, you keep notes in your pocket, wallet or purse, and they also get all mixed up.
Now there are a few important differences between how coins and notes get mixed up. Coins are relatively small things. You can hold a whole bunch of them in your hand and have a pretty good idea how much money you have by just looking and counting. Notes are relatively larger things that are usually stacked on top of each other. When you hold a bunch of them in your hand, you can’t know how much money you have by just looking and counting because there will inevitably be notes that are covered by other notes. When this happens, what I would normally do is shuffle the bills together and count them by glancing at the number in the corner of the bill. I can’t do this in England because the different denominations of notes are also different sizes. There might be a £5 note between two £20 notes, but I could easily miss it because it’s smaller. The only way for me to count all my notes is to remove each note from the top of the pile and put it on the bottom of the pile, thereby allowing me to see every note I’m holding.
I do realize that different size notes are great for the blind, but do they have any other user advantages over same size notes? If you’ve used both types of notes, which seems more usable to you?
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Comments
Both size and color differences allow us to identify the notes much faster. With US bills you can’t glance as quickly on a note to identify its denomination. When I am in Europe I tend to just look into my wallet and pull out the right bill whereas in the us my the US my behavior I tended to be to pull out the folded wad and leaf to the right bill. Another interesting thing is nobody in Europe uses a money clip, this could be just tradition but I also suspect the usability is different.
Carl Beeth on 20 Nov 03
After living in the UK and Europe I started keeping my money in order, lowest to highest denomination notes in the back. I did this to avert any fivers tucked between a couple 20s. I continue doing this with my plain greenbacks to this day. I keep my bills out of my wallet, but refuse to use a money clip as it add extra room to the pocket.
The categorization system helps quickly skip through the bills in incremental order using only one hand. I have no idea how folks that keep their money randomly ordered do this sanely or with out wasting time. (No I do not order my socks in this manner or underwear, but my hanging shirts are often ordered by season, pattern, and color.
vanderwal on 22 Nov 03
I find UK money far easier to use than US money simply because of the colour differences - a fiver is green, a tenner is orange and a twenty is purple.
Simon Willison on 23 Nov 03
Carl Beeth makes a spirited defence of the money usability of US dollar bills but this seems to me to be a case of “usability is what you know”. Leaving aside the issue of the blind and partially sighted, the most important difference between US and…
TrackBack from bluebones.net on 25 Nov 03
Personally I find US notes too easy to mix up. Sure, they are easily stored in the wallet and I do like the smaller size from that perspective, but you do have to take special care when handing over, or getting back, notes as one note is much the same as another - or perhaps that’s just because I’m not conditioned to be used to them. To me it makes much more sense to at least have different colours for different notes.
One thing that really gets me about US notes is the smell (sniff one if you don’t believe me) - now that’s not good usability!
Tony | TwoEyes on 26 Nov 03
I find UK notes perfectly usable, I keep them jumbled up in my pocket and always manage to pull the right one out without looking. 5 notes are thicker, and 20 notes feel very large, so the other ones must be 10. I rarely end up with any fifties, and if I did I’d be very aware of it in my pocket, burning a hole… :)
Aegir on 4 Dec 03
I remember hearing one time that having different colours and sizes for paper currency is also a great deterrent to counterfeiters. Draining the ink from a five-spot to print it off as a hundred would be much harder to get away with.
I must agree with Tony on the subject of different colours; being Canadian, I love my purple tens and blue fives! So easy to know how much you have at a glance.
Marq on 15 Dec 03