New Standard Keyboard

An anonymous reader writes "There are two keyboard standards today - QWERTY and DVORAK. QWERTY, the one we usually have, was used on the first commercially produced typewriter in 1873. Ironically, QWERTY was actually designed to slow down the typist to prevent jamming the keys, and we've been stuck with that layout since. New Standard Keyboards offers new "alphabetical" keyboard. This keyboard has just 53-keys (instead of 101) and offers user-friendly benefits and quick data entry."

Comments

Ironically, that story isn't true

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop perpetuating myths.

Dvorak made up that story as marketing for the keyboard design he hoped to profit from. And, could they have made that new keyboard any uglier?

Re:Ironically, that story isn't true

[Anonymous Coward]

Trogre could have all the energy and ambition in the world, and he STILL wouldn't find any studies showing a "clear advantage" to the Dvorak keyboard. That's because such studies do not exist, despite the urban legends to the contrary. The work of Liebowitz and Margolis, cited above, makes this abundantly clear. The two economists thoroughly researched the entire Dvorak saga, and discovered that all of the things people like Trogre have heard about the Dvorak keyboard simply are not true. Most, in fact, have their origins in propaganda from Dvorak himself. No serious objective tests of the two keyboards found any substantial difference between them.

Re:Ironically, that story isn't true

[Wavicle]

The work of Liebowitz and Margolis, cited above, makes this abundantly clear.

The study by Liebowitz and Margolis depend heavily on two assumptions:

1) Dvorak's studies were self-serving and therefore suspicious.
2) Strong's studies were well controlled.

The first is kind of hard to argue, as the studies were self-serving. However, Strong's studies were NOT well controlled.

Don't believe me? Try getting the original material of Strong's research to verify his claims. You can't. Know why? Strong destroyed the material. If Strong's studies were well controlled, why did he shred his research when people started asking about it?

So in "researching the entire Dvorak saga", the two economists failed to even mention that Strong's research, which they use as the fundamental support of their argument, may be seriously flawed. At the very least we cannot take it at face value since we cannot analyze the data ourselves. In fact, Strong was not objective at all, from the very beginning he intended to show that any speed up with Dvorak is sufficiently small that retraining the Navy's typists would be impractical. So why did these economists overlook this fact? Well, they were themselves trying to argue that the market always picks the best solution.

Keep this in mind when you think about window's dominance in the market, or any other product that rose to the top through whatever questionable means. The paper in which these two economists wrote about Dvorak not being better than Qwerty was actually a paper in which they were saying "The market always chooses the best option." The keyboards were just the whipping boy they chose to use.

So which serious objective tests between the two keyboards have there been?

Product won't fly, details scarce

[fname]

This story needs some more details. The website is a re-hash of the press release and appears to be a naked grab to get some adsense revenue. Not to mention that details on the product itself is scarce, and it takes a lot of digging to figure out that this keyboard doesn't even have dedicated number keys. Nice idea, no story yet.

Here's a close-up picture.

The QWERTY Rumor

[ewithrow]

From http://www.chicagologic.com/QWERTYrumor.htm --

A long-lived rumor is that typewriter inventor Christopher Sholes arranged the letters in the QWERTY layout to slow down the typist.

If this were true, he would have located popular letters such as "A" and "S" at the far corners of the keyboard and located unpopular letters like "Q", "Z", and "X" under your fingertips, right where you don't need them. Looking at the PC (QWERTY) keyboard shows us that, in fact, the opposite is true.

What really happened was Mr. Sholes varied from his original alphabetic layout* when he placed commonly used pairs of letters such as "sh", "ck", "th", "pr", etc. on alternating sides of the keyboard to reduce jamming of the typewriter's swing-arms.

This design change actually had the bonus effect of speeding up typing by letting the user alternate hands more often - think drum roll.

A 1953 U.S. General Services Administration study of the QWERTY keyboard and it's only serious challenger, the DVORAK keyboard, found no appreciable typing speed difference between the two keyboards. Fingers travel less distance on the DVORAK layout, but additional alternating-hand keystrokes speed up the QWERTY layout. The result - a draw.

The fact is, QWERTY works and it works quite well.

* You can see remnants of Mr. Sholes original alphabetic layout in the QWERTY layout, namely the keys "FGHJKL".

More info

[IO ERROR]

More info about this keyboard:

Original press release
Engadget reivew
From the CES show

My problem with this so far is that the alphabetical layout is about as bad for your wrists as QWERTY. And I type too many numbers and symbols to seriously consider this type of keyboard.

Not to mention it has a Windows XP ^W^W Fisher Price theme.

And there's....

[sepluv]

the PLUM keyboard (similar idea).

Re:wrong

[iocat]

Most of the "Dvork is better than Qwerty" studies were done during World War II by - wait for it - Dvorak.

Speaking of which, y'all should check out my new IOCATB keyboard layout. It takes a little while to get used to, but once you do, it feels faster than anything else.

Re:Horrible, just horrible

[Dun Malg]

One of the biggest problems with the current AT-keyboard layout is the ordering of digits on the numeric keypad.

I mean, damn near every other keypad in existance begins with 1 at the top left and works its way down to 9 at the bottom right (think telephone, ATM, eftpos terminal, security keypad).

What it comes down to is that there are two original progenitors of keypad layouts. The ones you list all go back to Bell Labs design for the Touch-Tone(tm) phone keypad. They even spent a fairly good chunk of change testing for which was more efficient. The results were that for dialing phone numbers, the "123" pad was faster, even for people who were experienced 10-key ("789" keypad) users. The reason is actually quite simple. 10-key is generally used for financial data entry, so the most commonly entered digits (0 and 1) are placed close together where they are easier to hit without looking (some proprioception issue there-- the exact explaination why eludes me). As the 0 is under the thumb, that means the 1 has to be in the bottom row to be close to it. Thus the bottom-up layout.

Dialing telephone numbers, however, isn't something that's done repeatedly. Almost nobody dials a phone by touch*; rather, they look at the dial pad to guide their fingers. The "123" layout is better suited to visual navigation because we're already trained to read from left to right, top to bottom.

Computer keyboards still use the 10-key style layout because the primary use for the keypad is still the same as its ancestors, the calculator and adding machine. Changing it to the telephone-style layout makes no sense as there's already an even easier to use "visual navigation" set of number keys above the letters.

* after 10 years of programming names and numbers into phone systems via the keypad, I actually no longer look at the phone keypad as I use it; but I've only ever noticed that skill in phone techs who install systems.

Down with keyboards!

[kiddailey]

What we really need are alternatives to traditional typing -- ways to communicate with the computer in a more efficent manner.

I'm personally waiting for the wireless implant in my head so I can just "think" the words onto the screen :)

In the meantime, I've tried out the Twiddler2 chorded keyboard, which is a combination key entry and mouse device. Although a bit slower, it is FAR more comfortable surfing and chording with it than using the traditional keyboard and mouse (though you can forget programming). And it plays nice with OS X and Windows.

If you're interested, there are many other chorded "keyboards" as well as many more ergonomic variations to the standard keyboard. A useful resource is the exhaustive Alternative Keyboard FAQ and this alternative keyboard gallery.

Re:wrong

[asdfjilk]

I'm not sure if you can do this in windows or linux, but in OSX you can have your keyboard mapped to dvorak-qwerty where if you hold ctrl or alt, the keyboard reverts back to qwerty for just that reason.

Re:wrong

[j1m 5n0w]

I would tend to be suspicious of studies comparing qwerty to dvorak, since most people who learn dvorak learned qwerty first, whereas most qwerty users know only qwerty. Because of qwerty's ubiquity, it's very difficult to make an objective comparison.

I use qwerty and dvorak interchangeably, and am probably slower in both than if I had stuck with qwerty alone, but I find dvorak much more comfortable (and that's something that's much harder to quantify).

According to a quick google search, Barbara Blackburn is the fastest typist in the world and she uses dvorak. That carries more weight than questionable studies in my book, though I would prefer a better reference than a random web link.

Does anyone have data comparing the fastest known dvorak typists to the fastest known qwerty typists?

Re:wrong

[Max Romantschuk]

Such things exist, and people are using them as well:
http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/foot.htm

Remove the foot.htm bit for the whole site, it uses frames.

Actually, it's very clear

[Moraelin]

Typing "TYPEWRITER" fast was simply a sales gimmick, so the salesmen could tell clueless PHBs "see! It doesn't slow typists down! I can type TYPEWRITER quickly!" And unsurprisingly, clueless PHBs existed in 1870 just as well, long before computers, and corporate purchases were made based on some rigged non-representative demo.

But there were real mechanical considerations there too.

Typewriters used to be purely mechanical things. Hitting a key physically pressed a lever, which swung a small hammer at the paper. Actually, at the ink ribbon. And on the hammer a letter or digit was embossed. (Actually, two. SHIFT would physically raise the carriage, so the second letter on the hammer hit.)

Because it was purely mechanical and involved densely packed thin levers, it was jam-prone. If you hit two keys at the same time, two hammers would try to occupy the same space at the same time. If they were coming from opposite ends, not much would happen: 99% of the time one would just hit on top of the other. But if they were adjacent (or almost adjacent) levers, the machine would jam.

That was the problem they tried to solve: keeping the machine from jamming. Which involved moving the hammers for most common letter combinations further apart from each other. Which, since it was a purely mechanical contraption, involved moving the keys too. (It wasn't as simple as defining a new mapping table, like on computers.)

And whatever effect it had on typists and typing speed, was side-effect rather than considered in the design. Whether it sped them up or slowed them down, it still ended up faster if it didn't require unjamming twice a minute.

However, here's another fun fact: the typewriter for which that layout was designed was very different even from typewriters manufactured after 1900. After 1900 the hammers were arranged in an arc in front of the paper. Before that, they were arranged in a circle or bucket shape.

That bucket shape is what the QWERTY layout was designed for. Which meant that moving the hammers had some weirder effects on where the keys moved. E.g., near the middle of rows, two adjacent keys would swing hammers from opposite sides of the bucket. Hence the "TY" in "TYPEWRITER" would not jam that machine, which is why they're still near each other.

It would, however jam a post-1900 typewriter.

So basically the short story is: QWERTY was never supposed to be ergonomic, it was supposed to just prevent jams. And even that was a quick mechanical hack, which missed a lot of fairly commong combinations. _And_ even for the purpose of preventing jams it wasn't that useful any more, for any post-1900 typewriter.

Yet, more than 100 years even after the new typewriter design, and half a century after keyboards being used in computers (which don't jam) we're still stuck with the QWERTY idiocy.

Its saving grace, though, is that basically on a computer keyboard _any_ layout works just as well. Neither jams nor alternating hands (which made sense back when you had to hit the keys HARD on a typewriter) are relevant any more. You just type faster on whatever layout you're the most used to. For most people that means QWERTY.

Which means there's little real incentive to switch to a new layout.