Why Alphabetic Keyboards Are Not Easy to Use: Keyboard Layout Doesn't Much Matter

It is well known that the Sholes or qwerty keyboard is deficient in designed, hard to learn, and awkward to use. Alphabetically organized keyboards would appear to be superior for novice typists, but this has not been demonstrated in previous studies of typing. These experiments confirm the lack of virtue for alphabetically organized keyboards over both a randomly organized one and over the standard Sholes keyboard. To take advantage of the alphabetic keyboard requires considerable mental processing on the part of the user, and this processing is neither easy to do nor does it appear to offer much savings over visual search of the keyboard. The novice is faced with a tradeoff between mental processing and visual search, and this tends to make different keyboard layouts equivalent. In addition, many people know at least something about the Sholes keyboard, and even this little knowledge is useful, with the result that their performance will usually be better on Sholes than on alphabetic keyboards and certainly no worse. The conclusion is that it is not worthwhile to use alphabetic keyboards for novice typists, nor to change to the Dvorak layout for experts. Keyboards can probably be improved, but only though radical redesign of the present physical key configuration.