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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"Incidentally, this is also why the Dvorak keyboard layout is exactly the opposite of what you want in a highly ambiguous scenario; Dvorak places all the vowels adjacent to each other, significantly increasing ambiguity. Intuitively it rearranges word-space to put many common words right next to each other."

I suspected as much when it came to Swype; it's nice to see someone who has actually done the work verify this intuition. I use Dvorak on my physical keyboards, but I find it sort of... ironic, for lack of a better word... that the suboptimality of QWERTY is itself the key to how these alternate sloppy-keyboards work. It's sort of nice that my QWERTY skills don't entirely go to waste...

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I think a big part of the appeal of Dvorak in the dev community is that there's something very satisfying about a keyboard based on real research. That research was done for 10 finger full-size keyboards though, and doesn't really map to the current generation of keyboards. As I allude to in that footnote, we've actually done some really cool research into optimal keyboard layouts in ambiguous scenarios. We'll probably do a follow up post diving into that! (also stay tuned, there should be a paper coming out soon).

Yes, that's probably true. QWERTY is unlikely to be optimally suboptimal either.

...

OK, OK, that was snark, I admit it, but it felt good. Mmmm... oh yeah, that's the stuff.

More seriously, it is unlikely that QWERTY is optimal for this use case since it certainly was never designed for this.

    it is unlikely that QWERTY is optimal for this use case
    since it certainly was never designed for this

QWERTY was designed to minimize jams on manual typewriters. You get a jam when you press two nearby keys in quick succession. This is actually extremely similar to the layout constraint swype operates under.

I was talking about Minuum, not Swype there. For Minuum, "maximizing alternation" is not a priori obviously the same as "maximizing the information theory distinction" between two subsequent keypresses. In fact, the fact that you are trying to maximize separation tends to imply that you are thereby tending to make the next keystroke more predictable than it should be, which is to say that the likely next keystrokes have clumps where too many of the most likely "next letters" are all on one side, which is suboptimal from the information theory perspective. QWERTY is not likely to be optimal for this use case; it may even turn out that the optimal keyboard resembles it as little as QWERTY resembles Dvorak.

There's been research done on Dvorak? I remember a few years ago, when I was trying to learn it, I ended up looking into it and finding nothing but "this person can type faster on Dvorak than QWERTY!", ie. no actual studies with controls and all that, so I wound up giving up.

Got any cites?

(I'm not doubting you, I'm genuinely curious.)

It makes a certain amount of sense, when you think about where QWERTY came from - the problem has changed, but the solution is the same - to spread out the most common letters as much as possible in the uh... register thing where the hammers lived (don't know the technical term).

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