Fite Me Irl: Numeric Scales On Watches Matter

This post was originally published on the WatchClicker blog

When I was kid, growing up in the midwestern United States and visiting family in Nebraska – where “giant thunderstorms rolling across the prairie” isn’t just a Laura Ingalls-Wilder story, but instead a real experience – a family member of mine taught me how to calculate how far away lightning was. You, dear reader, may be familiar with this: count the number of seconds between seeing lightning and hearing thunder, divide by five, and that’s the number of miles between you and the lightning (the denominator is different for kilometers, but the same concept applies).

Chronographs support this too, or some do. If your chronograph has a “telemeter” scale visible to you, you can perform this same calculation, without mental math. This is just one example of the core idea of this post: scales on watches matter.

In user interface design (yeah, computer-based user interfaces), there is a set of 10 heuristics (“rules of thumb”) that are used to identify usability problems. Trust me, I’m a doctor. I want to focus on two of these heuristics here because they explain why scales are so important: visibility, and recognition, not recall.

In user experience evaluation, the visibility heuristic says that the user of a system should always be able see the status (in UX, of a computer system). Similarly, the recognition, not recall heuristic says that the user should be able to recognize what they’re supposed to do, not have to remember it based on prior experience.

In watches, I’d argue that these two heuristics help explain why the numeric scales on watches are so important. Take a dive bezel. The whole point of a dive bezel is that it serves as an elapsed time reference, so that a diver can time how long they’ve been underwater, in order to make sure they don’t get the bends in their ascent (notably: not how much air is left). Quite literally, the premise is to enable a diver to visually understand the state of the dive, and recognize (not recall) how long they’ve been underwater (referred to as “bottom time”). The rotating bezel mechanism enables the scale to change, reference point, but without the scale itself, you’d just have a fidget toy.

The value of a dive bezel, to a watch-wearer (even if one does not dive) is pretty obvious - timing how long your laundry has been the washer using a reference point on a bezel is a lot easier than remembering when you started your laundry and doing mental math. But! Lest you get the wrong idea, this post isn’t only about dive bezels. No no no, dive bezels are just the proverbial “BEER BAIT FOOD” sign on the proverbial gas station.

For Example: “Tracking Three Timezones”

Let’s take another example that really grinds my gears (get it? Gears? Watches? Eh? Eh?): “With a GMT Master II, you can track three timezones”. No. You. Can’t. The “three-timezone claim” assumes you have your standard 12-hour timezone, you have a 24-hour timezone as tracked by the 24-hour hand, and you have an external bezel that you can use to offset against the 24-hour hand.

But importantly: as soon as you turn that external bezel, you have lost all reference you previously had for the 24-hour hand! You have either changed the state of the system, or you have to recall (not recognize) the reference for the third timezone. To be moderately provocative - if mental math is necessary for tracking three timezones, any watch can track all timezones, because “all you need” is mental math.

Notably, some folks do this correctly! Grand Seiko has a number of GMT watches with a 24-hour scale printed on the chapter ring (excuse me, rehaut), as well as on an external rotating bezel. That will let you track three timezones! My argument here isn’t that “GMTs can’t track three timezones”, but instead “GMTs with only one 24-hour scale can’t track three timezones”.

#More Broadly: Scales Matter Look, I’m hearing you (cough Will cough) - I don’t hate GMTs. They’re actually my favorite complication. My point here isn’t about GMTs, it’s that the scales on watches matter. Fundamentally, a lot of what we, as watch enthusiasts, talk about when we talk about tool watches is about usability. Tool watches are tools because they facilitate and support a specific task and goal. The usability of these watches allows them to work well, and helps people not have to think about the tool.

The thunderstorm story I told at the top? Nurses do similar mental math to measure a patient’s pulse. A pulsometer scale on a chronograph makes that easier. Is it necessary? No. Is it helpful? I’d venture to say yes. You can absolutely compute how fast you’re going based on mile markers and mental math, but a tachymeter scale on a chronograph makes that easier. Sure, you can do mental math to compute three timezones with a GMT hand and a rotating bezel, but it’s easier if you put a 24-hour scale on the chapter ring and on an external rotating bezel, like Grand Seiko does in some models.

Fundamentally, most of us watch enthusiasts know this: it’s why putting a 24-hour bezel on an SKX mod is nonsensical - that scale doesn’t align with the time-telling of the watch. It’s why the new Rado Captain Cook Over-Pole is…. weird, and not a worldtimer: you have to do the mental math to translate your local time to a 24-hour scale and then align that with a city ring. The usability of watch scales is also partially why California dials feel weird to lots of people – changing the way of representing numerals requires recall, not recognition.

#Can “scales matter” go too far?

What’s that, dear reader? Shouldn’t we just put All The Scales on watches? In short? No. Here, let me translate that to Spanish for you too: No.

Consider the Sinn 900 Multifunktions Chronograph. It will definitely support “visibility” of system status, but over-stuffing scales massively harms recognition, not recall. It’s not only that the dial is too visually busy (it is), but the busy-ness on the dial makes it hard to read the watch because it requires you to remember how.

User experience principles would suggest that expert users will learn to use this kind of watch and it’ll be an effective tool, but it’s essentially inscrutable to novices. I’ll be the first to tell you: I’ll own being a novice, and I don’t want to do what it takes to be an expert!

Fin

I have now convinced you that scales on watches – and more fundamentally, watch usability – matters! This article is over. Remember: watches are fun, buy what you like.