indessed roscivs

An oft-repeated canard is how the Qwerty keyboard that we use today was intended to slow down typists, and that the only reason we don’t switch to something vastly more efficient is because everyone’s already using Qwerty keyboards. While it is true that the Qwerty keyboard gets its layout due to typewriter jams that no longer exist in the computer era, the changes weren’t intended to slow people down, but rather, to move oft-used pairs of letters apart from each other on the keyboard. Some people even claim that this improves the efficiency of Qwerty typers as compared to random (or pure alphabetical) layouts.

When confronted with studies calling into question the ability of Dvorak typists to significantly outperform Qwerty typists, Dvorak users often instead emphasize that most typists switch to Dvorak for ergonomic reasons, stating that their carpal tunnel symptoms went away after switching. This may be true, although I’d be interested to see studies that question whether the symptoms go away because of the layout in particular, or if switching to any arbitrary non-Qwerty layout improves their condition. If the latter, it may turn out that if everyone were to switch to Dvorak and use it from birth, then switching to Qwerty later on in life could reduce carpal tunnel symptoms as well! Or, of course, Dvorak could end up being intrinsically better, but I’d love to see some hard research on the topic.

What I’m mostly concerned about, though, is typing speed. If I get a significant boost out of an alternate keyboard layout, I’d be tempted to make the switch. Dvorak doesn’t seem like a likely candidate for me, although Developer’s Dvorak, which is similar to Dvorak but specially suited for the arcane symbols that software developers type day in and day out, seems appealing. But how can such a thing be measured?

Obviously home-row keys are the easiest to hit. A keyboard that keeps me on the home row most of the time will win out, all other things equal. But the “alternating hands” thing is important too—if I’m on the home row but I have to hit a bunch of keys with the same hand, that’s likely to feel less efficient than alternating back and forth but adding in some above-home-row keys. In fact, I’d say that for me personally, keys above the home row are just as easy or easier to hit as home row keys.

So if I were analyzing a string of text to see how difficult or easy it would be to type, home row and above-home-row would get the easiest rating. Typing two consecutive characters with the same hand would get a slight penalty; two characters with the same finger a steeper penalty. Anything that requires the row below home or the “number” row would get a steep penalty as well. “Finger travel distance,” a concept many use to measure efficiency, doesn’t really affect my typing so I wouldn’t use it as a concept in and of itself.

What would be interesting is to run a key-logging program that kept track of all the keystrokes I made throughout the day, what order, and at what time I made them. Then another program could take that information as input and check against various keyboard layouts to see which layout is most efficient (given my above “rules”) for a typical day of typing. This Dvorak site has a similar “efficiency”-checking program that you can use on any arbitrary block of text.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 8:50 pm and is filed under computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.