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.