All of us use the keyboard daily under different capacities, chances are there you are reading this article on a computer or a smartphone that uses either a physical or virtual QWERTY keyboard standard. We use this keyboard layout every day, and there are a lot of questions you ask yourself and sometimes fail to get the answer without the little help of Mr. Google. Why are the keys arranged the way they are? Is there an alternative layout from the common QWERTY keyboard? If yes, is it possible to adopt the alternatives? And should everyone adopt it?
Well, if your curiosity has ever taken you down these lines of thoughts before, then prepare for some of your questions to be answered.
What you have to know first is, the QWERTY keyboard has been around since 1873 and was invented by Christopher Latham Scholes and few other changes made by his colleagues before it was patented and used in the Typewriter. A lot of myths, however, exist for its design layout including the popular one that it was has designed so that the word TYPEWRITER could be typed using one row only.
To me, the reason I find fully legitimate for the design however it might not be the sole reason why they arranged the letters in that order is the human factor majorly the positions of our fingers and how often we always use them. If you carefully notice, our index fingers are the most used fingers in our hand compare to the small baby finger or ring finger and the thumb is naturally built to press objects in this case the space bar key.
Alphabetical order makes it hard to type
And, we tend to use mostly the index fingers while typing which can be a nearly perfect analogy in this case. For the reason of why this layout over the alphabetical order, the arrangement of alphabets in order makes it very hard to type commonly used words in English which partially explains why the keys are dispersed they way they are. Common letters can be easily found in the first or middle row and concentrated in the center of the keyboard layout as well.
Many alternatives to QWERTY layout exist in the market and people argue that it’s quite faster to type using these alternatives but unfortunately, everyone has refused to adopt these options including device manufacturers which explains why you haven’t seen or heard about the DVORAK keyboard either. At the same time, AZERTY keyboards are very popular in French speaking countries. QWERTZ is another variation used in Central Europe (Germany, Austria and the neighboring countries). These later layouts might have been well-researched and based on logic but they came out when the QWERTY layout had been standardized already which makes it very hard to win people’s heart.
For you to adopt these alternatives and finally ditch the common layout will take a lot of unnecessary sacrifices and many frustrating moments which might make you eventually give up.
