Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout For Swype 140
New submitter Analog24 writes: The QWERTY keyboard was not designed with modern touchscreen usage in mind, especially when it comes to swype texting. A recent study attempted to optimize the standard keyboard layout to minimize the number of swype errors. The result was a new layout that reduces the rate of swipe interpretation mistakes by 50.1% compared to the QWERTY keyboard.
Not surprising (Score:1)
Since the QWERTY layout was designed to SLOW down typists of the day, so the mechanical typewriters of the day wouldn't get their keys stuck or jammed together from typing too fast before the previous letter's hammer fell back.
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Re: Not surprising (Score:2)
more detail. http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebo... [utdallas.edu]
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Just so you know, your myth is [possibly] a myth [blogspot.com.au]
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Just so you know, your myth of mythiness is a myth. The guy writing this blog post fails at reading comprehension.
His one sole piece of "evidence" for this being a myth is an academic paper saying [IF] you set out to design a slow keyboard layout, you would probably design qwerty.
That's not the same thing as the person designing qwerty set out to make a slow layout. It's in fact well documented that his goal was to reduce jamming, and in fact he filed a patent for the design (US 79868), stating that explicitly as his goal.
The fact that reducing jamming meant that the letters were laid out in a pretty weird way just happened to slow down typing on a non-jamming-keyboard as a coincidence.
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I decided to investigate the myth. I created a simple script to output letter frequencies for large pieces of text and this is what I obtained for the book "War and Peace," by Tolstoy:
E: 315232, T: 226406, A: 205807, O: 192879
N: 184174, I: 174282, H: 167404, S: 162894
R: 148428, D: 118289, L: 96527, U: 65433
M: 61646, C: 61624, W: 59207, F: 54896
G: 51326, Y: 46266, P: 45533, B: 34659
V: 27086, K: 20431, X: 4384, J: 2574
Z: 2387, Q: 2330
Most high frequency letters:
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Because you do not type faster, if all the most frequent letters are in the home row. Just try it, type some Text only consisting of the homerow letters, then type some english text. If you are a good typist, the english text will be much faster.
There are several reasons, but for example see typing st, the fingers are one finger away from each other (stopping irritation when the t-finger returns to the home row) and you need to move your finger for the t, which makes it more distinct (try typting stststt an
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Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Informative)
No, no it wasn't.
It was designed so that the hammers for successive key presses came from different areas of the typewriter, and hence reduce jamming (speeding up typing).
It happens that this is slower than the optimal layout if you ignore jamming, but much faster if you don't.
The result is that several layouts are better now for keyboards (which don't jam), but the design intention was not to slow typists down. It was to reduce jamming, and in doing so speed them up.
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Graffiti? (Score:3)
Instead of a stylus, how about we make the area of the on-screen keyboard instead act as a finger-pad when the phone is held in-portrait? I think it'd be big enough to reproduce Graffiti strokes with one's finger so that a stylus wouldn't be necessary...
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And the conclusion is: instead of trying to improve on input methods on tiny devices, we should require all trousers makers to have a keyboard-sized pocket.
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The 5 row hardware QWERTY keyboard is the reason why I still have my 4 year old Epic 4G (Galaxy 1) and refuse to upgrade it, because there is no new phone I want. The last Android phone with a hardware keyboard came out in 2012.
Apparently Sprint is desperate to sell me a new phone... they've started sending me upgrade offers via FedEx.
Re:Graffiti? (Score:4, Informative)
LG Optimus F3Q, February 2014.
No idea if it's any good or not, but it's a five-row QWERTY that came out last year.
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the area of the on-screen keyboard instead act as a finger-pad...
I don't know about you, but I write with a pencil more accurately than a finger. Leverage gives me the upper hand in precision.
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graffiti is nice (there are graffiti keyboards for android), but not as fast as good swiping. You want to try swiftkey, then you will never want to use swype again. Swiftkey beats them all at swiping and at good predictions, typos and next word based on previous word. Have a typo in your sentence? Do not bother to set the text mark correctly (which is annoying on android). Just keep backspace pressed (swiftkey goes into "delete whole words" mode), type the word correctly, then touch the correct suggestions
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I guess it depends, which one you're used to. I tried both, when i did not use swipe before and liked swiftkey more. And the google keyboard has too little feedback.
The old "let's learn a new keyboard" routine (Score:1)
Tried many times in the past, failed. The amount of time and effort to reach proficiency on a non-standard layout, combined with the presence of standard layouts in business and consumer products, means you are fighting the Beta vs. VHS war. It's right up there with designing new pet programming languages that are essentially syntactic sugar, offering no additional computability.
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Really? Took me about a month to get used to Dvorak. Fifteen years ago. Totally worth it IMO. You might be surprised how plastic the brain is.
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And I bet you don't own a TV either, right?
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Bry ypg.v Cy-o cb mf iapai. ,cyd mf jrmcj xrrtov C rjjaocrbannf epai cy rgy yr lnaf Ipab Ygpcomr 3v
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Tried many times in the past, failed. The amount of time and effort to reach proficiency on a non-standard layout, combined with the presence of standard layouts in business and consumer products, means you are fighting the Beta vs. VHS war. It's right up there with designing new pet programming languages that are essentially syntactic sugar, offering no additional computability.
I don't think that is true at all. I put MessagEase keyboard on my Android phone a while ago. They have a training game that you can get also. By the time you have played the game for 10 minutes you are faster than you are on a qwerty keyboard. It is grid of only 9 main keys. Touching a key enters that letter, but sliding your finger from that key in towards the middle does a different letter. Punctuation is on there as slides in other directions and you can even enable number entry without switching to the
Heh (Score:2)
I couldn't even adapt to swyping.
Language (Score:5, Insightful)
The effectiveness of swyping depends quite a bit on the language. I find that it works fairly well in English, but not nearly as well in some other languages, where there may be many more ambiguous words. This also means that the optimal keyboard layout would depend on the language, which would be horrible to use for those of us who use two or more different languages.
Re:Language (Score:5, Insightful)
Its particularly bad in Korean, where the words tend to alternate consonant-vowel-consonant with the consonants on the left and vowels on the right. It just ends up being an exponential explosion of possibilities without much branch pruning. Its also harder in agglutative languages than non-agglutatives, because you can't have a simple dictionary of all words.
But in the end it doesn't matter. If you actually use a keyboard, 2 features are must haves- the first is that you need to be able to type the occasional word. The second is that you need to know where the keys are, so you can type-swype efficiently. That precludes a new keyboard layout, as you know more or less where every key on a qwerty is- you don't on an "optimized" layout and you'll take months to learn. An alternate keyboard doesn't have that much time, it has a few hours max to get you to love it.
Disclaimer: I worked at Swype from 2010-2012.
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What makes it worse for Korean is that they removed the ability to change words. So if you're swyping along and you realize you entered a wrong word, well fuck you. You have to go back and delete the entire word and try again. No tapping the word and picking an alternate spelling. It used to have that functionality, they removed it, and can't seem to understand why that's a problem. If I wasn't such a long term user, I'd dump it, but it's hard to go back. Though, they keep pushing.
I've found accuracy to be
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It is language specific, and they intentionally disabled it. It used to work fine. Then they disabled it in one update for what amounted to "reasons" and when called out on it on social media basically just gave excuses and have made no attempt to reenable it. It's really annoying.
Fascinating (Score:2)
TL;DR: Classic keyboard layout optimization places commonly used keys close together to reduce finger motion, but swipe layout optimization spreads them out in order to improve recognition.
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Classic keyboard layout optimization places commonly used keys close together to reduce finger motion
This is incorrect. Any decent optimization (on a normal keyboard) places the commonly used keys in the home row, and places them so that you're more likely to alternate hands between each keypress. Less-used keys go on the upper row, and the least-used keys go on the bottom row (which is harder to reach), but the overall goal is to alternate hands.
SwiftKey (Score:1)
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Flow is Swiftkey's knock off of Swype. It probably has some differences in the algorithm that will make it better for some words and worse for others, but its just a knock off.
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Swiftkey is better than Swype if you type more than you swipe and often type in several languages (which totally breaks any swipe algorithm). This is why I disable Flow in first place (and it is also a memory hog, as the rest of Swiftkey).
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english german dual dictionary mode with swiftkey works quite good here.
The what keyboard? (Score:5, Funny)
reduces the rate of swipe interpretation mistakes by 50.1% compared to the QWERY keyboard.
I think you accidentally a letter.
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And here I am with no mod points.
Virtual +1 Funny to you, sir.
- he accidentally what? - a letter. (Score:2)
QWERY keyboard layou is the bes, you insensiive clod!
Awww maaaaaan (Score:5, Funny)
Muscle memory - where UI designers go wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Zero chance of retraining people's brains. Any keyboard layout requires muscle memory. Doesn't matter which one you pick, you still have to use it a long time and develop the muscle memory.
This is where UI designers go horribly wrong. They don't realize that people have been using View / Source in Firefox, or File / Save As... in GIMP, etc for LONGER THAN THESE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN OUT OF COLLEGE and it's next to impossible to override years of muscle memory. Even if you know in your brain that View / Source has been moved, or that it's File / Export... now, you can't stop the muscle memory. That's why so many people hate UI designers who shuffle things around for no reason. It doesn't matter where View / Source is. What matters is that it's always where it is supposed to be.
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This explains why GIMP is so horrible. Things have been done a certain way in image editors for decades and these guys come along and move everything around because they think they're better than everybody else.
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there are plenty of people who took the time to learn/use the Dvorak keyboard.
Who? I never met one? I'm sure they exist, but the problem with trying to improve language based things is that we already speak this one. Even if the incumbent sucks, the cost to change is far too great. It's like all those bitches that constantly moan about Windows. Too bad, MS got in first, so their way is the de facto standard in PC land.
If you're interested in challenges, I'd like to see a paper on the best method for replacing a large incumbent cultural norm. eg If you had to get everyone to stop spe
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You are right, I am lazy, but so is everyone else, so you have to take that into account when judging your target market. I'm assuming more people are lazy like me than like your average adventurous Dvorak user.
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I downloaded a few keyboards and settled on Minuum. Default Samsung sucks, Swiftkey was way way better at typing but still took to much space. More than 50% of my screen in landscape mode. Minuum gives me the screen space to actually see what I am typing. It could do with better prediction though.
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Who? I never met one?
Let me introduce myself...
Everyone makes fun of me, though.
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Yes, I perhaps have the one computer in the office that no one even tries to use any longer. Even IT just leave irate sticky notes.
Re:Muscle memory - where UI designers go wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Teenagers and 20-somethings have not been using these things that long; if you switch to a better UI, the youngest people will adopt it fastest and easiest. Just because you're 60 and have been using these paradigms for the last 25 years doesn't mean everyone is happy with them.
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The same teenagers whose care factor for keyboard layout s is precisely zero? Your argument might make sense if you were talking about jeans or haircuts, but keyboard layouts, not so much.
The big issue here is the incumbency inertia, which is as close to an immovable object as you can get.
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you seem to know nothing about current teenagers.
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Ask these 20-somethings how they feel about stupid marketing stunts when they are (20+3)-somethings and all the UI standards change yet again.
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The majority of users are not teenagers. And in reality we older fellows actually work for a living and make money for our companies. We are the actual USERS of the equipment.
Most teenagers are using computers for video games. It really doesn't matter what the OS GUI is like for this. If they complain about the "old GUI" it's often because they are too lazy to learn how to use it.
And furthermore "the better UI" simply sucks. Proof in point [pingdom.com].
Any sane GUI designer would be wiser to think of the actual users, a
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One particular new UI sucking is not proof that all new UIs suck.
And just because we've done things a certain way for 30 years does not mean that's the best way to do things, it just means it has a lot of inertia.
You probably don't remember this, but back in the early 1900s, there was a lot of resistance to putting steering wheels in cars, because earlier cars had tillers. A lot of people thought they should just stick with tillers, because that's what had been used before and people were used to them. It
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The tiller was used because the first cars were about as slow as boats, so they were steered with a tiller like boats. However as cars became faster and more powerful the tiller was no longer adequate, and thus the wheel was adopted as it simply worked better. Yet your example only proves the point: since the 19th century there has been NO CHANGE in this UI for steering a car. Once the wheel was invented, no one wanted to go back to the tiller and no one even invented some other way to steer a car. There is
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Once the wheel was invented, no one wanted to go back to the tiller and no one even invented some other way to steer a car. There is something optimal in the use of the steering wheel that makes any other refinements and changes useless.
You've gone from a good explanation of why the change happened to a complete assumption. Just because everyone uses the steering wheel doesn't make it superior. There have been other ideas, such as side-sticks. Now, it may very well be that nothing better than steering wh
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"Just because you're 60 and have been using these paradigms for the last 25 years doesn't mean everyone is happy with them."
Only an ageist bigot would cast an acquired skill as a liability. Once upon a time if we weren't "happy" that we lacked a skill we'd put in the time to learn it.
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So I'm an "ageist bigot" for telling people who became masters at riding horses that they need to give that up and learn to drive a car instead? Or that people who became masters at making buggy whips that they need to give that up and learn a new profession because no one wants buggy whips any more? Or that people who became masters of texting on a 0-9 keypad featurephone need to give that up since all the new big-screen smartphones don't have keypads any more?
Keyboards are becoming obsolete (Score:2)
Keyboards are becoming obsolete. You can text without one on a smartphone. About the only people who will use them in 20 years will be coders, because of the different conventions for #defines, variables, etc.
Remember Mr. Scott trying to use a computer by talking to it, and then picking up the mouse and speaking into it?
Re:Keyboards are becoming obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)
You can text without one on a smartphone.
And on the basis of that you think that keyboards are becoming obsolete? I can get everywhere I need to go on foot, but that doesn't mean my car is going to become obsolete.
Keyboards will be around until something that's actually better comes along. Speech recognition certainly isn't it, no matter how good it gets.
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Most people don't work with computers with keyboards (think point-of-sale touchscreens, etc)
Pens aren't obsolete even though they're used far less in business since the invention of the typewriter.
So what's more natural for them than to just say your message and hit send?
It may be "natural" but there are a multitude of times and places where it would be entirely impractical or inappropriate to do so. Imagine the fun of trying to send a text via speech recognition on the bus while even just one person sitting near you is doing the same.
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Imagine the fun of trying to send a text via speech recognition on the bus while even just one person sitting near you is doing the same.
Ever try to type on a bus? Even with a laptop it's pretty much impossible. Better to spend your time reading, catching a nap, or whatever.
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It'd still be easier and more private than trying to use speech recognition.
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Again, have you ever tried to type on a moving bus? Also, most of your messages don't need to be private - "okay, I'll pick up milk on the way home", "I'm going to be 10 minutes late", and the classic "Dear John" text message - "You suck. You can't even change the roll of toilet paper. We're done."
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Again, have you ever tried to type on a moving bus?
Again, my only point is that a keyboard is generally a far more useful and usable input method than speech recognition for such a situation and many, many others.
Also, most of your messages don't need to be private
Who are you to decide that?
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You are the one who brought up the bogus bus example, so don't blame me that it's weak as wet toilet paper.
And if you believe that ANY of your messages are private, you're incredibly naive.
The masses will always choose convenience over security. But if you're that paranoid about your text messages being public because you're not using keyboard input, maybe you shouldn't be leaving an electronic trail in the first place?
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You are the one who brought up the bogus bus example, so don't blame me that it's weak as wet toilet paper.
How is it weak? And in what did I blame you for said imagined weakness?
You can point out how it might be slightly more awkward to text on a bus than when you're sitting at home until you're blue in the face, but that's not going to make up for the fact that speech recognition is going to create more problems that it would solve in that situation for most people. It'd have to work over any ambient noise, including other people trying to send text messages by babbling at their phones or - ugh! - having conver
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Again, your bus example is a red herring. Almost nobody writes texts on the bus because most people take the bus during peak periods, when there's no ROOM to text. And during off-peak hours, it's still too bumpy even on good roads.
People surf the web or listen to music. That's the reality. Texting is relegated to "ok" and "cy".
So, back to reality (which you seem not to want to do). People in offices use headsets (you know, ear buds with a microphone embedded in one of the leads). No shouting, no need to s
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Almost nobody writes texts on the bus because most people take the bus during peak periods, when there's no ROOM to text.
That's not been my anecdotal experience.
And during off-peak hours, it's still too bumpy even on good roads.
Again, not my experience. Maybe we have better roads around here, or people are more tolerant than you think. But fine, let's shift the example - which was only supposed to be about people in close proximity - to the bus station where everyone's waiting for a bus. All the points I made still stand. Ambient noise, other people speaking, and privacy. Which people do want, even if they don't need it. Try asking a real person sometime. They're funny like that.
People in offices use headsets
Not in my of
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Keep your head buried in the sand. The same was said about mice. And electric cars. And computers that were small enough to be "luggable". And a space station. And heart transplants.
Ever work in an "open office plan"? If only one person is talking on the phone, everyone can hear what they're saying. If everyone is talking, no individual voice is distinguishable. So, not a problem. Personally, I found such floor plans very distracting when coding, but bosses be bosses, and a decent music collection mitigate
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Now you're really reaching. "The majority of people in the world don't even use smartphones yet. A touchtone phone with T9 is still the norm for the majority of the world's population."
First, t9 sucks. Text-to-speech is already better.
Second, world-wide sales of smart phones have exceeded feature phones since 2013. With a billion sold per year, it will be only a few years before the majority of the world's existing feature phones are replaced with smartphones.
Third, you're obviously not a programmer, bec
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You might want to take your own advice from your first paragraph. After all, you were wrong about the majority of the world using T9 (it's only one of several systems of text entry used on feature phones).
Your first paragraph is ironic given that you base your comments on YOUR experience.
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Really? Not ironic? Here's what you said :
I wonder if you'll ever realize that making overreaching generalizations with zero supporting evidence, other than your own biased personal experience, isn't going to convince anyone of anything and only makes you sound dumber.
And now you're claiming that your own biased personal experience counts:
f you could grasp context you would understand that it's not ironic. The whole point of my comment was to give you examples from MY personal experience that show your statements are incorrect.
On second thought, it's not ironic - it's deeply hypocritical AND trolling. Especially when you followed it up with:
You're either extremely ignorant, extremely stubborn, or a troll. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're the latter at this point. Otherwise, I hope you're better at programming than arguing why keyboards are becoming obsolete.
Now in the end it doesn't matter, since time will prove me right. If you're going to troll, you need to do way better than that. And if you're not trolling, you need to look in the mirror to see the cause for why your argument is hypocritical.
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One. More. Time. As I've said many times, your bus example is a red herring. And your experience certainly doesn't agree with what I've seen, so the whole thing is anecdotal on both sides.
Now take a look at something that's objectively true. It's illegal in many jurisdictions to hold a phone in your hand while driving, so here's a huge financial incentive to use voice commands and speech-to-text. Not just from the fines, but also the increased insurance premiums and demerit points going forward.
Offices I
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Keyboards are becoming obsolete. You can text without one on a smartphone. About the only people who will use them in 20 years will be coders, because of the different conventions for #defines, variables, etc.
I assume you've never had an office job anywhere ever? In case you're new to this, those big buildings in the big smoke are filled with people at desks on computers. Those computers are all controlled via keyboard. Unless you're planning on designing a bespoke user interface for every single operation done on every computer everywhere, then I can't see the qwerty keyboard going anywhere soon.
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"a bespoke interface" == no such animal. Interfaces are not customized to the individual user. All the programs on all those office computers are using the same interface for the same version of the program.
I was using voice control back in Windows 3.1, and it's really improved since, so there's no need for mouse and keyboard, or even a screen, for many jobs (think screen readers for the visually handicapped).
Combine a touch screen with voice commands and voice dictation, and kiss the keyboard bye-bye for
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"a bespoke interface" == no such animal. Interfaces are not customized to the individual user. All the programs on all those office computers are using the same interface for the same version of the program.
Er yeah, that was my point.
I was using voice control back in Windows 3.1, and it's really improved since, so there's no need for mouse and keyboard, or even a screen, for many jobs (think screen readers for the visually handicapped).
Yeah they've improved from being extremely crap to mildly annoying. Still not even close to the speed and accuracy of a keyboard and mouse.
Combine a touch screen with voice commands and voice dictation, and kiss the keyboard bye-bye for the average job.
I can only assume you've never had an average job...
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Voice recognition and dictation has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years. Maybe you should get a modern smartphone and see just how easy it is to text w/o using a keyboard nowadays, instead of talking out of you ass. (Hey, you're the one who started with the personal insults, writing "I can only assume you've never had an average job...") You are demonstrating the "failure of imagination" that too many people with a narrow world view have. While I spent LOTS of time writing code for a living,
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Voice recognition and dictation has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years.
Yeah but it's still shit.
Maybe you should get a modern smartphone and see just how easy it is to text w/o using a keyboard nowadays, instead of talking out of you ass.
I have and it's shit.
You are demonstrating the "failure of imagination" that too many people with a narrow world view have.
Or maybe I know something you don't. Plenty of research done in this area, there's reasons why it's not commonly used, nor will be. Maybe you have "failure to filter hype over reality"
While I spent LOTS of time writing code for a living, I realize that's an "edge case" - keyboards will be gone from most offices in the next 20 years, same as desktops and mice will be. In those scenarios, even a laptop is clunky and chunky.
But more still the most efficient and effect type of input, by a long way
Won't even be needed during lectures in the colleges and universities. Just let your phone make a transcript of what's being said, and if there's something interesting on the white/black board, take a picture. Or make a video.
Part of the memory process is actually writing stuff down. I don't think you have a full grasp of all the issues associated with human-machine input.
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Funny how you say it's still sh*t when those who try it can use it without even having to train the speech recognition engine (and it gets getter as the engine adapts to the speaker).
As for the reason it's not commonly used, that's mostly inertia. People don't know that their Windows laptop or Android phone can do speech recognition. When I do it on mine, they say "hey - that's not an iPhone!" So then I show them how to do it on their own device (phone or tablet) and they really like it.
Also, you're wron
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Funny how you say it's still sh*t when those who try it can use it without even having to train the speech recognition engine (and it gets getter as the engine adapts to the speaker).
As for the reason it's not commonly used, that's mostly inertia. People don't know that their Windows laptop or Android phone can do speech recognition. When I do it on mine, they say "hey - that's not an iPhone!" So then I show them how to do it on their own device (phone or tablet) and they really like it.
We're all techno-philes here, this is a nerd site. Perhaps your one use case is different from the rest of the world where we don't all speak with American accents. I hate typing and have been actively seeking alternatives for decades. They are all shit for me all the the people I know. I have tested this with numerous people over the years and the result is always the same. I don't type because I like it, I type because it works.
Also, you're wrong - speech is far more efficient than a keyboard.
Speech is. Speech recognition isn't. I can only assume you live somewhere wher
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There is no reason the software needs to wait to get context. It can auto-correct based on the next few words when it realizes you meant "Hear" and not "Here." It's not like it's already printed and immutable.
Italics and bold should only be added if and when necessary - and they're certainly not necessary in text messages or business letters, and not in a first draft of, say, a manuscript. Content over presentation.
Or, if you want to do it inline, just have a few on-screen "keys" to toggle bold, italics,
The purpose of Swype (Score:2)
The purpose of Swype is to speed up typing on a touchscreen in an easy to use and intuitive way.
How do you think completely changing the layout that people have been learning for the past 140 years will be received? If swype didn't fit with existing keyboards no one would use it.
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If only there were some [wikipedia.org] examples [wikipedia.org] of everyone quickly learning how to interface with their phone in a new way...
Kids even mastered the horrendous "multi-tap" rather than use valuable minutes on their phones.
T9 dramatically improved upon multi-tap despite requiring a new usage pattern and some training time. If someone comes up with a similar improvement over the iPhone-style finger poke and Swype-style entry systems, people will adopt it.
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T9 is a terrible example for two reasons.
First, T9 was "clearly to the left of the uncanny valley" - the number pad is clearly not a rearranged QWERTY arrangement of keys, so the existing muscle memory doesn't apply. Moreover, the use of the letters on the phone keypad, while not a regular way of entering text up until that point, was still at least loosely familiar to anyone who needed to dial a vanity 800-number.
Second, the fact that "feature phones", aka "messaging phones" or "dumb phones with a QWERTY k
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You forget your history. T9 was an alternative to the alpha-numeric based system that has existed since the touchtone telephone. T9 is to the 12 keys on the old Nokia brick as Swype is to the QWERTY keyboard. People interfaced with their phone in a new way but using an existing and widely adopted keypad, and iTap is a logical extension.
Neither technology attempted to move about or change the underlying keypad. "A" was still on the top left of every phone, "Z" was still second bottom row right. The only thin
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While the keypad was around for decades, people were only using it to enter text in rare circumstances - 1-800-MATTRESS and the like. Only with the advent of SMS did people need to start entering a lot of text. People did NOT have the letters memorized until after SMS came into being, and in fact the old touch tone pad lacks certain letters altogether. So you had people quickly memorizing the keypad in a short period of time, and in fact inventing an entire "texting" shorthand language - then completely cha
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Again think of what and why in history.
I would have no qualms in learning a new keyboard layout if the QWERTY keyboard suddenly de-materialised all over the world. That was what happened to kids sending SMSes. There were very few phones with a full keyboard layout. In absence of an alternative people will not sit around idly, just like the reason we are all used to typing on QWERTY keyboards now is because of how prolific they are.
If you're talking about getting people to optionally give up some keyboard la
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I would have no qualms in learning a new keyboard layout if the QWERTY keyboard suddenly de-materialised all over the world.
I'm simply suggesting that you might also be willing to learn a new keyboard layout if it made you some magic number more productive. The magic number will be different for different people, obviously, but it exists for most people.
You may not remember the old world, but I can recall almost monthly some article somewhere talking about changing the layout or keypads on those old dumb phones to improve typing speeds.
I remember the articles, but the only company that I can recall actually following through was RIM. It obviously never took off, and I'm in agreement that simply shuffling around a keyboard will not be enough to make the masses shift - it would have to be more dramatic than that.
Done long ago (Score:2)
https://play.google.com/store/... [google.com]
I used that app back in 2012, and it wasn't just-out-of-beta then, either. When I used it, it effectively solved all of its intended problems: common letter combinations were in close proximity, and there were fewer "word collisions" than with Swype ("or" vs "our" immediately coming to mind).
The problem I found was the fact that while Flow is more accurate, it took me significantly longer to type out a message because I wasn't used to the layout. I've spent over 20 years on
Try Flow keyboard (Score:2)
Flow [google.com] is another keyboard designed along similar lines, though it's optimized for slightly different criteria: fast text entry rather than low error rate. It takes a while to get used to, but you really can type a lot faster with it.
Shorthand (Score:1)
Simulated annealing (Score:1)
A random walk with hops being shortened over time is called "simulated annealing". It's an alternative to genetic algorithms and tends to be easier to use for problems with solutions that can't be chopped up and put together in a coherent format. For instance, keyboard layouts, which require
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