Saturday, August 1, 2009
QWERTY-be-gone
Much of the debate around modern mobile handsets is around the text entry mechanism. If you’ve gotten used to a device with a QWERTY pad, will you be able to go back to T9? How can anyone touch type on a device with an on screen keyboard? Will haptic feedback make them just as usable?
All these debates (except around T9) make one fundamental assumption: keypads can only use the QWERTY layout. This is where one must take exception. QWERTY is a 140 year old standard with a seemingly random layout of letters that were arranged to avoid mechanical jamming in the technology of the 1870s. Generations of typists have grown up with memories of their baffling first encounter with the layout, something they had to learn because that’s the way it’s always been done.
To shrink that same layout down to under three inches and call it state of the art is just bizarre. Keyboards are from an era where the technology of the day demanded a two dimensional layout. We’re no longer constrained by that technology. Look at your fingers, folks. Look at how amazingly dextrous each of them is, how capable of independent movement each is. Look at how you can hold a pen to paper and make coordinated muscle movements across fingers to write. Keyboards take no advantage of this ability. A keyboard is a flat, rectangular layout with a key for each symbol, where your only possible interaction with that key is to press it down.
Rather than shrinking that rectangular layout, why not change the possible interactions with each key? How about if you could both press down and up? What if you could record interaction with every joint in your finger, instead of just the tip?
Chorded keyboards and keyers have been around for decades, but have failed to gain mainstream acceptance because (a) there’s a learning curve, and unlike the learning curve of QWERTY, there’s no incentive to scale it, and (b) as a result, there aren’t enough users to establish a standard from among the competitors.
But for the first time in the history of digital text communication, there are now more people who use their phone as their primary means of communication than a regular computer. The time is ripe for QWERTY’s mobile successor to be born.
Shourya — Aug 2, 2009 1:13:32 AM — # ↩
I think we are, erm, well, stuck. The Dvorak layout was pre-world war II, and is arguably a good attempt at some of the things you point out, but it never caught up.
For those unfamiliar with DSK: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard
For the daring, here is how to switch: www.wikihow.com/Switch-to-a-Dvorak-Keyboard-Layout
Thought-provoking post.. thanks.
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Aug 2, 2009 10:30:14 AM — # ↩
Dvorak is an excellent example of how hard it is to break the status quo. This sort of change seems possible only when (a) going through a radical change in form factor, or (b) when pushed through by a large user with good financial muscle and top-down control to enforce a new way (such as the military).
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Aug 2, 2009 10:32:31 AM — # ↩
Over on Facebook, Siddharta Govindaraj (siddhi.blogspot.com/) asked:
My response:
Graffiti and Jot proved to be ultimately slower than keypads. They did make a very important point though: it’s easier to train a human to write in a new way than to train a computer to recognise the existing way. Humans are far more adaptable at this sort of thing than computers are.
Russ Nelson’s been working on a chorded keyboard prototype for years. While his is nowhere near production, it is indicative of the possibilities: blog.russnelson.com/chordite/
Ashwin Nanjappa — Aug 2, 2009 5:27:19 PM — # ↩
IMO it is highly unlikely that any of the cellphone companies are going to introduce a radically new keying technology. The only way that a new keying technology for cellphones can become popular is if it first takes on the avatar of a hardware addon. For example, say an Android cellphone allows hardware addons (much like Firefox does for software addons). Someone can then produce a keyer that can communicate with the cellphone over Bluetooth.
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Aug 3, 2009 2:19:27 PM — # ↩
True, though given the number of crazy experimental designs Nokia has brought to market in the past, it may not be beyond them to try – if they have such a line of research ongoing.