Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout For Swype

New submitter Analog24 writes: The QWERTY keyboard was not designed with modern touchscreen usage in mind, especially when it comes to swype texting. A recent study attempted to optimize the standard keyboard layout to minimize the number of swype errors. The result was a new layout that reduces the rate of swipe interpretation mistakes by 50.1% compared to the QWERTY keyboard.

Comments

Re:Graffiti?

[Shakrai]

Touchscreens will never be able to compete with physical keyboards for speed regardless of how you lay out the alphabet. Fine motor skills work best with tactile feedback, which is denied to you when using a flat touchscreen.

Language

[itzly]

The effectiveness of swyping depends quite a bit on the language. I find that it works fairly well in English, but not nearly as well in some other languages, where there may be many more ambiguous words. This also means that the optimal keyboard layout would depend on the language, which would be horrible to use for those of us who use two or more different languages.

Re:Language

[AuMatar]

Its particularly bad in Korean, where the words tend to alternate consonant-vowel-consonant with the consonants on the left and vowels on the right. It just ends up being an exponential explosion of possibilities without much branch pruning. Its also harder in agglutative languages than non-agglutatives, because you can't have a simple dictionary of all words.

But in the end it doesn't matter. If you actually use a keyboard, 2 features are must haves- the first is that you need to be able to type the occasional word. The second is that you need to know where the keys are, so you can type-swype efficiently. That precludes a new keyboard layout, as you know more or less where every key on a qwerty is- you don't on an "optimized" layout and you'll take months to learn. An alternate keyboard doesn't have that much time, it has a few hours max to get you to love it.

Disclaimer: I worked at Swype from 2010-2012.

Muscle memory - where UI designers go wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Zero chance of retraining people's brains. Any keyboard layout requires muscle memory. Doesn't matter which one you pick, you still have to use it a long time and develop the muscle memory.

This is where UI designers go horribly wrong. They don't realize that people have been using View / Source in Firefox, or File / Save As... in GIMP, etc for LONGER THAN THESE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN OUT OF COLLEGE and it's next to impossible to override years of muscle memory. Even if you know in your brain that View / Source has been moved, or that it's File / Export... now, you can't stop the muscle memory. That's why so many people hate UI designers who shuffle things around for no reason. It doesn't matter where View / Source is. What matters is that it's always where it is supposed to be.

Re:Muscle memory - where UI designers go wrong

[Analog24]

First, I just want to say that the purpose of the analysis wasn't to design a new keyboard to try and get people to switch to. We just thought it was an interesting problem and wanted to see what it looked like. But I disagree with you, there are plenty of people who took the time to learn/use the Dvorak keyboard. It's a small fraction of the population but it's not an insignificant number of people. I agree that pointless changes like the ones you mentioned in GIMP are annoying and detrimental but retraining yourself to improve efficiency at some task is not unheard of.

Re:Muscle memory - where UI designers go wrong

[Grishnakh]

Teenagers and 20-somethings have not been using these things that long; if you switch to a better UI, the youngest people will adopt it fastest and easiest. Just because you're 60 and have been using these paradigms for the last 25 years doesn't mean everyone is happy with them.

Re:Not surprising

[beelsebob]

Just so you know, your myth of mythiness is a myth. The guy writing this blog post fails at reading comprehension.

His one sole piece of "evidence" for this being a myth is an academic paper saying [IF] you set out to design a slow keyboard layout, you would probably design qwerty.

That's not the same thing as the person designing qwerty set out to make a slow layout. It's in fact well documented that his goal was to reduce jamming, and in fact he filed a patent for the design (US 79868), stating that explicitly as his goal.

The fact that reducing jamming meant that the letters were laid out in a pretty weird way just happened to slow down typing on a non-jamming-keyboard as a coincidence.