Post 02 · 3 min read · workshop journal

Four preset amounts, and why not more.

The recharge form has four chips: 15, 25, 35, 50 €. A custom field accepts anything from 5 to 100. Every so often somebody asks why we do not have five or six chips, or why not a slider.

Because the eye reads chips in one line

Four chips fit in a single row on a phone, in one row on a laptop, and — most importantly — in one glance. Six chips wrap to two rows on 320-pixel screens, and the wrap turns the picker from a decision into a search.

Because prepaid balances are spent slowly

The workshop's request history tells a very boring story: most orders sit exactly on 15 or 25, a chunk on 35, a smaller chunk on 50. Anything above that is unusual enough that a typed field feels more honest than a big chip suggesting it is normal.

Because a slider is a bad steering wheel

Sliders look modern; they are terrible at hitting a round number on a touchscreen. Every accessibility test we ran on the earlier prototype ended the same way: keyboard fine, mouse fine, thumb fingers on a bus — always off by a euro or two.

So: four chips, plus a text field for the edge cases. Not scientific. But it works, and the request queue is quieter for it.

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