The Future of the Keyboard

Revolutionizing Typing Experience: Exploring Innovative Possibilities and Advancements

Fig. 1 — Image by Ali Mahmoudi (https://unsplash.com/photos/sy-C9CC_HZo)

It was the year 2016, when Apple released the Touch Bar and the butterfly keyboard mechanism, which replaced the traditional scissor switch design used in previous models. It took only 3 years for Apple to return to the scissors mechanism due to the general dissatisfaction among MacBook Pro users.

I’m one of the lucky ones who got the not-so-terrific butterfly keyboard. The only thing I could think of was “Why didn’t Apple just go full touch keyboard?”. Seven years later, we still don’t have this type of solution in the market but I now feel capable to debate and defend how amusing the concept would be if we decided to invest in this type of experience.

So in case you haven’t noticed: this is going to be the focus of this use case, a hypothetical touch keyboard.

Problems with today’s keyboards

• Key travel (it was reduced from the Scissor to Butterfly, but then again…);
• Sticky and/or unresponsive keys;
• Sensitivity to dust and debris;
• You might have to adapt to a new keyboard, depending on the country you acquire it;

So is it possible to have a valid alternative to this? Yes, because all of these problems were solved on other devices a long time ago, such as the iPhone and iPad. So what can we gain by having a touch keyboard?

Advantages of the Touch Keyboard

First things first, forget sticky, unresponsive keys — that problem is now solved. If for some reason the touch keyboard is sticky, then you just need to clean it the same way you clean your smartphone. Can it still be sensitive to dust and debris? Sure, but not more than a smartphone or a tablet already is.

Fig. 2 — Touch Keyboard

(About the key travel and the new keyboard, this can easily be solved by embracing customization and allowing the user to establish the type of experience that the user wants.) Let’s say that the user has big fingers and therefore, would enjoy a bit bigger keys. Right now there’s a gap between the keyboard keys, and it’s probably not wise to exclude them (for some reason they exist until this day) but that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t work on the Touch Area, which would mean that the user wouldn’t need to click exactly on the key in order to add the desired character.

Arc Browser (need an invitation? Click here) recently released a feature called “Boost” — Boost lets you control everything from the color, the font, to the layout of every website you visit. How great would it be if we could customize our keyboard in the exact same way? Let’s say that I want to set my keyboard with the font Montserrat — I can just customize it. Or if Ryan Gosling wants to use Papyrus, why shouldn’t he?

Fig. 3 — Papyrus keyboard

Looks great, doesn’t it?

Fig. 4 — Not really, no.

We’ve seen the concept of customization around the font, but let’s now see how it would go if we would customize the color scheme.

Fig. 5 — we could establish a gradient or solid color, the only requirement is contrast.

One other big advantage of having a touch keyboard is the language. Let’s say that I travel from Portugal to Hungary and I need to buy a new laptop. I will be limited to acquiring a computer with a Hungarian keyboard which will compromise the way that I work at a very deep level. The learning curve would be massive given the cognitive memory of someone that has been using a Portuguese keyboard since ever.

So what if I could just change it from Hungarian to Portuguese? First, let’s have into consideration the fact that there are two types of keys: The Action Keys (like enter, spacebar, shift, etc.) and the Character Keys. Action Keys are universal and exist in any keyboard in the world — so for that same reason, these keys will be blocked (as you can see in the image below). This means that you would only need to choose the new language and conclude the process.

Fig. 6 — Changing to the Hungarian keyboard

Conclusion

One of the advantages of recreating the keyboard for a touch keyboard would be the possibility of making the MacBook thinner. Is this possible? Maybe not, given the fact that there are other components such as the USB C that we would need to have into consideration. But by removing the keyboard, the laptop would at least be lighter, and based on what was mentioned previously, it would give the users the out-of-the-box experience that has been lacking from Apple for so long.