Typing Errors: The standard typewriter keyboard is Exhibit A... Dvorak not so great either

Here are some facts about Dvorak that are easy to verify and the utility of which is obvious:

- Dvorak has the most used keys on the home row. Compare: AOEUIDHTNS VS ASDFGHJKL;

- Dvorak optimizes for alternating hands, which obviously helps speed. Ever tried typing "street" or "states" in Qwerty, two common words with common letters that you have to type all with the left hand? On the Dvorak side the worst word is "joke" I think.

- Dvorak optimizes for typing a bit more with the right hand instead of the left hand, which makes sense because the right hand is usually the strongest.

- Dvorak optimizes for typing from the outside to the inside (try tapping your fingers in rapid succession on the desk from outside to inside, then inside to outside, and you'll see immediately which one is easier and faster).

- Dvorak optimizes for typing more with stronger fingers (index and friends) than weaker ones (pinkies and friends).

- Dvorak has all the vowels on the left hand on the home row (except Y which is conveniently on top of I), one beside another, which is great for learning. It also makes sense because you use consonants more than vowels, (see right hand argument) and since the most used consonants are on the right home row, it optimizes alternating hands.

No need to mention Qwerty makes no such optimisations and the result is correspondly atrocious.

See? No need to bullshit with biased reports about history.

http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/

From the site: "The carpalx project attempts to find the best keyboard layout to minimize typing effort for a given set of input documents. These documents may be English text, programming code, or whatever you find yourself typing for hours"

Take a look at the studies from those results.

Seems to me that the logical conclusion of such a study, would be a Designed Keyboard (DK). Said GK has to be better than any alternative that came from a) Random arrangement b) being able to type 'typewriter' at sales demonstrations or c) designed to to avoid jams of moving parts. We would call this Not Designed Keyboard (NDK)

So we have DK and NDK. Almost by definition DK has to be better than NDK.

Now we all know that in order to do a good job we need to use the right tool for the job. If the job is typing which it is for 100,000 of people then the only logical conclusion is that we need to use the better keyboard in this case Designed Keyboard. (DK)

Next what if you had an organization with 1,000 secretaries that their whole work was to type documents day in and day out for the next 20 years and you could improve their typing in just 1% using a better keyboard. Would it be economically worth doing? Of course.

In conclusion switching to a DK is the smart choice, is the cheaper choice.

And the only thing absent from this article in "reason" magazine is precisely that; reasoning.

There might be a advantage for a programmer's keyboard, basically QWERTY with common punctuation on a fifth row above the numbers. But my few brief experiments with unorthodox layouts caused no end of hassle when trying to use other people's machines, so I gave up.

As you can guess the author shows this to be bunk science.

The article claims that the cost of learning the new skill could never be amortized and uses this evidence:

> In the first phase of the experiment, 10 government typists were retrained on the Dvorak keyboard. It took well over 25 days of four-hour-a-day training for these typists to catch up to their old QWERTY speeds. (Compare this to the Navy study's results.) When the typists had finally caught up to their old speeds, the second phase of the experiment began. The newly trained Dvorak typists continued training and a group of 10 QWERTY typists (matched in skill to the Dvorak typists) began a parallel program to improve their skills. In this second phase the Dvorak typists progressed less quickly with further Dvorak training than did QWERTY typists training on QWERTY keyboards. Thus Strong concluded that Dvorak training would never be able to amortize its costs. He recommended instead that the government provide further training in the QWERTY keyboard for QWERTY typists.

I really can't express how stupid this is. The logical implication the article would have you draw from this study is that qwerty actually may be MORE efficient. To believe this, you'd have to believe that the top end hypothetical speed of qwerty is higher than dvorak. This is literally physically impossible, as I've already pointed out. Moreover, the fastest typist ever used Dvorak. While that's not conclusive, it's suggestive. Folks trying to optimize a skill to the highest level are very good at cutting out all inefficiencies.

To understand the results of the study cited there, we need only look to exercise science. First of all, what most lay people don't realize is that a great deal of exercise results for activities like weight training is explained by the exercise's affect on your nervous system, not your muscles. Properly managing your nervous system response is at the heart of continued gains, and not managing it properly leads to overtraining and plateaus. All top flight Olympic athletic coaches spend much of their time thinking about this.

As a matter of fact, it is a well known and well documented phenomenon in the literature that if you train at close to maximal capacity on the same training regimen for longer than 3 to 4 weeks, you will stop making gains. You'll see big increases the first 3 weeks, and after that, nothing. This is a nervous system effect.

Armed with that knowledge, it becomes clear why the study's results look the way they do: The dvorak trainee were already in a state of CNS fatigue, whereas the qwerty trainees were starting out fresh.

Dvorak is clearly better than qwerty. Colemak is even more better. However, I don't think this situation is much of an indictment of the free market. I don't think the bottleneck in most people's productivity now (or ever) was top end typing speed and it would take quite a long time to recover the cost of the switch. Considering that this is THE MOST concrete example ever cited where you might be able to say that government meddling could induce a positive effect, I'm not inclined to agree that it's in general a good idea to have our economic lives centrally manipulated. There are far more examples of net economic losses from government interference.