Habit Over Efficiency: Why We’re Stuck with an Outdated Keyboard Layout
In the modern day and age, we spend massive chunks of productive time typing away on our keyboards. Whether it be college assignments, frantic Google searches, or texting your friends, there’s no doubt that typing is an essential part of life nowadays – yet few see how inefficient this is. Chances are your keyboard uses a typical “QWERTY” layout. You’re likely to be more than familiar with the layout such that you pay little attention to it when typing, but what if I told you that arrangement of keys has been proven to be greatly inefficient (and harmful) when typing in English?
The QWERTY layout was designed around the advent of typewriters in 1874. A common misconception is that common characters were deliberately spaced out to avoid typewriters from jamming, however the truth is even less tactical – the layout is a modified version of an alphabetical keyboard layout. There is almost no regard for how far you must move your fingers to hit common keys, such as ‘E’ or ‘T’, making long typing sessions very uncomfortable. As a matter of fact, many decisions on where letters were placed were particularly transitory. For example, since original typewriters omitted dedicated characters for numbers 1 and 0, the letters I and O were used in lieu to represent these numbers. Hence, it is believed that these letters were placed beneath 7, 8, and 9 to allow writers to swiftly input years such as 1870, 1880, and 1890 (written as I87O, I88O, and I89O). Of course, now that we’re firmly in the 21st century, these efficiency adjustments from the 19th century no longer provide us any benefit, instead leaving us with two more vowels positioned uncomfortably far from where your fingers rest.
Many solutions over the decades were attempted to mitigate this – primarily alternative keyboard layouts, such as Colemak. Colemak is a keyboard layout that was released on the 1st of January 2006. It was designed to make typing in English more efficient. It is named after its inventor – Shai Coleman. These types of layout aim to place common letters of the English alphabet on the middle row of your keyboard to avoid making you needlessly hunt for keys around your keyboard. The benefits can easily be felt, as Colemak allows for 35 times more words to be written on the home row compared to QWERTY. As a user of Colemak for nearly two years, I vouch for the increased comfort, yet something not to overlook is how long it took me to relearn typing; over 3 months spent being proficient in neither keyboard layout resulted in a massive hit to my productivity.
Yet, regardless of how, statistically, QWERTY is greatly inefficient for traditional typing methods, some benefits emerge from it as well. As much as you may want to pursue using exotic keyboard layouts on your phone, you may notice that the spacing of common letters on a tiny touchscreen display that comes with QWERTY makes it easier to type. With a phone, you’re likely going to be using two thumbs to type. A keyboard layout which crams common letters in the centre would uncomfortably make your thumbs repeatedly crash into each other. In addition, the lack of tactile feedback provided by touchscreens makes it so that you would be considerably more prone to typing errors as you cannot tell exactly where one key ends and another one begins – this is massively exaggerated when a lot of the keys you’re pressing are right next to each other.
This leads to the ultimate flaw of typing: while QWERTY is hypothetically magnitudes worse than alternatives such as Colemak, the nearly two centuries of standardisation of QWERTY has led us into a position where much of the population is accustomed to a single, unoptimized keyboard layout. Learning a new layout takes a lot of effort and time which most people, quite understandably, do not want to put in.
Therefore, should you switch keyboard layouts? Ultimately, that is up to you. Your typing speed is unlikely to increase drastically – your comfort, however, almost certainly will.
Karol Ziolkowski
Sources
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/origins-qwerty-keyboard-typewriter-180982726/
Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QWERTY_keyboard.jpg
