Why Alphabetic Keyboards Are Not Easy to Use: Keyboard Layout Doesn't Much Matter

Abstract

These studies demonstrate the inferiority of alphabetically organized keyboards as compared with a randomly organized keyboard and the standard Sholes (qwerty) keyboard. Use of the alphabetic keyboard requires considerable mental processing; the novice is faced with a trade-off between mental processing and visual search, and this makes different keyboard layouts equivalent. Comparison of different keyboard layouts by computer simulation of expert typing shows surprisingly little effect of keyboard arrangement for a wide class of keyboards. Performance with some alphabetical layouts is quite slow, but with others, it is within 2% of the speed achieved when using the Sholes keyboard. Performance with the Dvorak keyboard is only improved by about 5% over performance on the Sholes keyboard. The conclusion is that it is not worthwhile to use alphabetic keyboards for novice typists, nor to change to the Dvorak layout for experts. Keyboards can probably be improved, but only through radical redesign of the present physical key configuration.