deskthority

I like the presenter's style, but, even as a Dvorak skeptic, I've got to say he makes some weak points.

Dvorak's book doesn't sound any more florid than the style of the times. And he was far from the first to take on Qwerty:


http://oztypewriter.blogspot.co.uk/2012 ... blick.html

Blickensderfer DHIATENSOR (from which Dvorak took his right hand home row's consonants) tried and failed back in the 1890s, decades before he did. What mistakes did they make, with their astonishingly light weight and skeletal hardware designs? Besides "not being Qwerty"?

The bit that made me laugh though was when he pulled out an iPhone and toyed, painfully, with an alternate keyboard design in an app. Good thing he didn't use the system's own! What touch screen OS doesn't use Qwerty as its system default? Even going to glass wasn't enough to shake the crusty old thing off.

Qwerty is a famous, canonical even, example of the network effect. As long as everyone knows it, everyone will use it. What a shame.

And it's not only about speed, it's also about comfort. Qwerty scores low on comfort. In my language (Dutch) the most common letters are e n a t i r o d s Let me make the top row letters italic, homerow letters bold and bottom row letters underlined. This is how the most typed letters are layed out: e n a t i r o d s

Here are the 5 most common digrams: EN DE ER AN ET GE. Let's see how they are layed out:
EN - top, bottom
DE - home, top
ER - top, top
AN - home, bottom
ET - top, top
GE - home, top.

So, none of the most common digrams are completely on the homerow. And worse, most include row jumping. Even worse, the most common digram requieres a top-bottom jump.

Don't tell me Qwerty is a near-perfect layout. It sucks. You'd have a hard time designing a worse layout.... That's why nearly all other layouts are better.

Absolutely. Qwerty is so desperately bad, yet so immovably entrenched, that it's the perfect example of a network effect maintaining a broken standard.

The chance to replace it was lost in the 19th century. It will only die when we stop typing. Nothing to do with its merit, and everything to do with its ubiquity.

Not really a good subject for an engineer. He tries his best to see a technical reason for its success. But there is none.

Muirium wrote:I like the presenter's style, but, even as a Dvorak skeptic, I've got to say he makes some weak points.
The bit that made me laugh though was when he pulled out an iPhone and toyed, painfully, with an alternate keyboard design in an app. Good thing he didn't use the system's own! What touch screen OS doesn't use Qwerty as its system default? Even going to glass wasn't enough to shake the crusty old thing off.

I also think the video overall was a bit weak, but this is kind of unfair. He was trying to point out that main way in which QWERTY could be displaced is if we start doing something altogether different, like typing on a phone screen, where the advantages of some new system would outweigh the historical inertia the QWERTY layout has going for it. I don’t think he was at all suggesting that the particular keyboard demoed is the future.

pietergen wrote:Here are the 5 most common digrams: EN DE ER AN ET GE. Let's see how they are layed out:
EN - top, bottom
DE - home, top
ER - top, top
AN - home, bottom
ET - top, top
GE - home, top.

So, none of the most common digrams are completely on the homerow. And worse, most include row jumping. Even worse, the most common digram requieres a top-bottom jump.

I think this is the wrong analysis. EN and AN alternate hands, so row changes don’t matter as much, and even a top-to-bottom jump is fine (you can start anticipating the movement with the other hand before you finish typing the first letter). ER is very easy to type. The real bad ones here are DE which uses the same finger twice in a row, and GE, which requires the index and middle fingers on the same hand to reach in opposite directions.

Muirium wrote:Absolutely. Qwerty is so desperately bad, yet so immovably entrenched, that it's the perfect example of a network effect maintaining a broken standard.

The physical keyboard shape is more desperately bad than the QWERTY layout, in my opinion. It’s not at all related to the shape or natural movements of human hands. Switching to a keyboard with tented, angled, properly separated halves, and a column stagger makes more difference for comfort and efficiency than switching from QWERTY to DVORAK (or whatever).

With that said, QWERTY is also pretty bad, and once a better physical layout is decided on, it’s also worth switching the character mapping.

There is something to be said about "good enough" and "marginal improvements".

Care to say it?

I'm with Clay Christensen on this one: disruption is the only way to dethrone Qwerty. Something entirely different to the physical typewriter keyboard will come along, seem wholly inadequate, but win over users even so, while keyboard makers shrug and wonder what thebig deal is, until they're gone. Think Blackberry vs. touchscreen keyboards. Which the video hinted at. Alas, even that wasn't enough. Typing this with thumbs on glass just now, it's still old Qwerty glowing back at me…

Perhaps Qwerty's end will be voice. Or something else as natural, without the abstraction of keys. Whatever it will be, it hasn't come yet.