QWERTY vs. Dvorak: The Keyboard That Never Was
How an American psychologist failed to replace QWERTY with a better keyboard design, and what we can learn from this
By Slava Polonski
TL;DR: Examining the failure of an American psychologist’s attempts to replace the QWERTY keyboard with a more efficient keyboard design, and the implications and startup lessons to be learned from this effort.
The original invention
It was the 1930s, and August Dvorak sat in front of his clunky old manual typewriter, his fingers sore and tired from hours of typing. As a professor of education at the University of Washington, he had spent years researching and analyzing the mechanics of typing, and he had come to a realization: the QWERTY keyboard layout, which had been in use for decades in typewriters, was inefficient and caused unnecessary strain on the fingers.
He determined that over half of all QWERTY key presses were on the top row, causing typists to move their fingers from the home row keys. Additionally, the majority of keystrokes were made by the left hand which is typically not dominant, and about 30% of all typing was done on the bottom row, which is the most challenging and time-consuming to reach.
