Origins of QWERTY
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
October 28th, 2008
at 4:16 pm on October 28th, 2008
I’m sick of this urban legend!
http://www.reason.com/news/show/29944.html
“As many businesses and government agencies contemplated changing keyboards in the mid 1950s, the General Services Administration commissioned Strong’s study to confirm the earlier results. This study provides the most compelling evidence against the Dvorak keyboard. It was a carefully controlled experiment designed to examine the costs and benefits of switching to Dvorak. It unreservedly concluded that retraining typists on Dvorak was inferior to retraining on QWERTY.”
at 4:31 pm on October 28th, 2008
http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
More here.
at 4:34 pm on October 28th, 2008
More here: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
The rival keyboards did ultimately fail, of course. But the Qwerty keyboard cannot have been so well established at the time the rival key-boards were first offered that they were rejected because they were non-standard. Manufacturers of typewriters sought and promoted any technical feature that might give them an advantage in the market. Certainly shorter training and greater speed would have been an attractive selling point for a typewriter with an alternative keyboard. Neither can it be said that the rival keyboards were doomed by inferior mechanical characteristics because these companies went on to produce successful and innovative, though Qwerty-based, typing machines. Thus we cannot attribute our inheritance of the Qwerty keyboard to a lack of alternative keyboards or the chance association of this keyboard arrangement with the only mechanically adequate typewriter.
at 6:51 pm on October 28th, 2008
If you’re a die-hard Dvorak Mac user:
http://www.chimoosoft.com/articles/dvorak.php
at 12:03 am on October 29th, 2008
I think that it is certainly possible that the Dvorak stats have been overstated in some cases, and I don’t want to play tit for tat on the stats, but even the studies cited in these papers give Dvorak a slight edge. The Donald Norman study even seems to suggest that Dvorak had an edge despite the prior knowledge of the Sholes layout, which could mean that the actual difference could be greater than the 5% they cite. I have not read that study, and so can’t comment on how they organized their statistics, but they do seem to point to Dvorak being at least slightly better.
I think it’s also worth noting that analyzing retraining costs is different from determining the efficiency of the design. In the end, getting any sort of reliable statistical number is going to be pretty much impossible.
Based on personal accounts I’ve gotten from Dvorak switchers, however, the difference can be dramatic (speed increases of 50% or more). Based on the “scant” amount of research done, I personally have to give these some sway.
As for the blurb I wrote, the main idea was not to suggest we all throw out our keyboards, but to provide some insight on why the keyboard is arranged as it is, especially in light of a better alternative (even if it only better by a slim margin).
at 11:41 am on December 3rd, 2008
Thought of you:
http://colemak.com/
at 1:33 pm on December 3rd, 2008
Thanks for the tip. I had no idea.