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Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

I don't get your point about typing phone numbers. When I was being taught to touch-type in first and second grade, my teachers told me that I should type on the top row, not the numeric keypad. Not sure why. Maybe because it takes less time to move to the top row and back? Anyway, to me, typing numbers on the top row is not an obvious problem.

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I mentioned that because I thought it showed how he'd never really watched one of the users in their job- once you get used to the numpad it's a lot faster. You can type in a long number very quickly without taking your eyes off the screen.

The numpad is a considerably faster input method, and it can be performed one handed. For a point of sale system, this is critical: the clerk can juggle an item while typing the phone number (or price, or whatever)

For a POS system input is probably all numbers- look up customer by phone, make choices from a menu, enter quantities. Letters are for new customers and special instructions.

I worked at a print shop that switched from DOS to Windows for it's POS software, it was an order of magnitude slower. At least we could play solitaire though.

The touch-typing course was probably developed 50 years ago for typewriters, which don't have numeric keypads.

Because most accountant and office types will use the numeric keypad and go blazing fast. That’s probably one reasons for the complaints. God help any PC tech who screws up their settings and doesn’t enable num-lock at boot.

> Maybe because it takes less time to move to the top row and back?

Presumably this is it. I find typing on numpad is much faster and simpler, but 1) laptops typically don't have one and 2) on normal keyboards it takes my hands away from the main keyboard. Then I switched to a Kinesis Advantage2 and now the numpad is integrated into the main keyboard, using a foot pedal to toggle between main keys and integrated keys.

It depends on the length of the number you're typing and the context.

In PoS, you're not likely to be typing many letters most of the time, so left hand for function keys, right hand for numbers is pretty good. You can move your hands if you move to a search.

When most of the stuff that you type are numbers then numpad makes more sense than top row (also, many non-english keyboard layouts have numbers in top row shifted).

For POS and similar applications it actually makes sense to design the UI such that it can be used only with numpad, for example by using +,-,*,/ as function keys for common operations.

The teacher was just trying to focus your practice on one specific skill instead of another.

That is until you are entering dozens or hundreds of numbers.

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