Design of Everyday Things - Norman, Don [80]
In the end, the keyboard was designed through an evolutionary process, but the main driving forces were mechanical. Modern keyboards do not have the same problems; jamming isn’t a possibility with electronic keyboards and computers. Even the style of typing has changed. In the early years, people kept their eyes on the keyboard and typed with one or two fingers of each hand. Then one courageous person, Frank McGurrin of Salt Lake City, memorized the key locations and learned to type with all his fingers, without looking at the keyboard. His skills were not recognized at first; it took a national contest held in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1877 to prove that this method was indeed superior.5 In the end, the qwerty keyboard was adopted throughout the world with but minor variations. We are committed to it, even though it was designed to satisfy constraints that no longer apply, was based on a style of typing no longer used, and is difficult to learn.
Tinkering with keyboard design is a popular pastime (figure 6.2). Some schemes keep the existing mechanical layout of the keys, but arrange the assignments of letters more efficiently. Others improve the physical layout as well, arranging the keys to accommodate the mirror-image symmetry of the hands and the varied spacing and agility of the fingers. Still others reduce the number of keys dramatically by having patterns of keys—chords—represent the letters, permitting one-handed or faster two-handed typing. But none of these innovations takes hold because the qwerty keyboard, while deficient, is good enough. Although its antijamming arrangement no longer has mechanical justification, it does put many common letter pairs on opposing hands; one hand can be getting ready to type its letter while the other is finishing, so typing is speeded up.
What about alphabetical keyboards (figure 6.3)? Wouldn’t they at least these be easier to learn? Nope.6 Because the letters have to be laid out in rows, just knowing the alphabet isn’t enough. You also have to know where the rows break. Even if you could learn that, it would still be easier to scan the keyboard than to compute where a key might be. Then you are better off if common letters are located where you are apt to find them by scanning—a property that the qwerty keyboard provides. If you don’t know any keyboard, there is little difference in typing speed among a qwerty keyboard, an alphabetic keyboard, and even a random arrangement of keys. If you know even a little of the qwerty, that is enough to make it better than the others. And for expert typists, the alphabetical arrangements are always slower than qwerty.
There is a better way—the Dvorak keyboard—painstakingly developed by (and named after) one of the founders of industrial engineering. It is easier to learn and allows for about 10 percent faster typing, but that is simply not enough of an improvement to merit a revolution in the keyboard. Millions of people would have to learn a new style of typing. Millions of typewriters would have to be changed. The severe constraints of existing practice prevent change, even where the change would be an improvement.7
6.2 Typewriter Keyboards.
6.3 Products with Alphabetical Keyboards. Even though several experiments show that these are of no use to novices and detrimental to experts, every year designers plunge ahead and foist yet another alphabetical keyboard on us. Even if you manage to learn one, you will not have learned to use all the different ones.
Couldn’t we at least do better with two hands at once? Yes, we could. Court stenographers can outtype anyone else. They use chord keyboards, typing syllables directly onto the page—syllables, not letters. Chord keyboards have very few keys—as few as