Digital technology moves so fast it can be easy to forget that a few things have been consistent for decades — like the QWERTY arrangement of the keyboard, which has been in use for well over 100 years. Looking at a computer keyboard, it’s extremely difficult to tell why this layout was chosen over the alternatives. Even a straightforward alphabetical arrangement would make more sense at first glance. The Dvorak keyboard layout in particular has been shown to increase typing speed by almost double, reduce errors, and reduce the amount of finger movement by a huge margin.

Using this Dvorak to Qwerty-comparison applet, the last paragraph took me 576 key presses. Under QWERTY, my fingers moved about 14 metres, but they would have moved 8 under Dvorak. Most of that comes from the Dvorak layout being able to handle almost 65% of the text on the home row keys, compared to a meager 32% for QWERTY.

The Dvorak Layout. Vowels are along the left side of the home row, most-used consonants on the right.

It turns out that the reason for this apparently silly layout goes all the way back to 1874, when the QWERTY layout was developed for mechanical typewriters. The earliest models used an alphabetical arrangement, but were prone to jamming. According to this summary:

The first typewriter had its letters on the end of rods called “typebars.” The typebars hung in a circle. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath. If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession.

So QWERTY was designed to specifically place the most commonly used letter pairs on opposite sides of the keyboard. Astonishingly enough, this layout has continued to be the standard for english-language typing ever since, despite it being less efficient than the alternative.

Tags: Design