Text File

Aucb.522 fa.editor-p utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Wed Feb 24 11:47:17 1982 qwerty, alphabetic, and dvorak keyboards >From sdcsvax!norman@NPRDC Wed Feb 24 11:43:42 1982 Sigh, the Sholes versus Dvorak myth rises again. I don't know where Bruce Borden got his facts, but his story sounds to me as if it were a combination of stories. I believe Borden is talking about the linotype keyboard, which uses the "shrdlu" arrangement. The Sholes keyboard (aka "qwerty") was designed for a typewriter so as to minimize the jamming of typebars as they moved to the platen. This caused the placement of frequent pairs as far from one another as possible. In fact, this SPEEDS typing because typing on alternate hands is faster than on the same hand (list of references and reprints of papers available on demand: see, for example Rumelhart & Norman in the next Cognitive Science). This point wasn't appreciated at the time because nobody thought of using all ten fingers, and typing without looking at the keyboard was unheard of; as someone else said, touch typing was a heroic, unexpected invention (and required a national typing speed contest to prove that it worked).

There have been hundreds of studies comparing Dvorak arrangements with Sholes arrangements. Dvorak fans claim massive improvements in speed. (We have an old movie -- made by Dvorak in mid 1900's that makes remarkable claims.) However, experiments done by neutral parties tend to put the improvement around the 5 to 10% range -- not worth the effort. Card and Moran at Xerox Parc have a computational method of computing speed that yields numbers in that range and Rumelhart and I have a full fledged typing simulation model that, when given the Dvorak keyboard, only speeds up by 5%. As others have pointed out, you can get a far greater improvement in typing speed by moving the RETURN key, either to where it can be reached without distorting the hand (say by the left thumb which our studies show is not used by typists) or by having automatic RETURNs (as in various text editors). Kinkead put it this way: elimination of the RETURN key gives a minimum of 7% improvement in speed and "up to 30% when the original copy is not properly formatted."

A while ago, I decided that alphabetically arranged keyboards would surely be better for first time typists, so we did some experiments. I was wrong. Randomly arranged keyboards and alphabetically arranged keyboards were equivalent. (Sholes arrangements were better, but that is probably because everyone has had some exposure to keyboards, even though we tried to study only non-typists.) On the typing simulation model, alphabetic keyboards were all slower than Sholes, confirming the fact that putting frequent pairs on opposite hands speeds up typing rate. Why wasn't alphabetic better? Because the mental effort to make use of the alphabetic arrangement is too much -- and most people don't know the alphabetic that well anyway (how far away -- and in what direction-- is "p" from "u"?, or even "e" from "i"?).

If you want to improve typing speed, don't tinker with the current key layout, but do dramatic re-arrangements, as in the new 5 key hebrew keyboard (by Gopher) or the various chord keyboards suggested by others. (Why would you want the crazy, staggered key, assymetrical, long key distances of the current keyboard? The hands are symmetrical and this keyboard isn't. The distances one must travel are extreme. The space bar is wasted. And so on.

Reprints of the simulation model paper and alphabetic studies are available. Large, detailed study of typing available in a monograth, but only for those who really care about detailed finger movements and response time distributions.

Don Norman (norman@nprdc ucbvax!sdcsvax!norman).

----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/

This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:

1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.

2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:

The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.