QWERTY, Dvorak and More

We've mentioned stuff related to this in the past, but louridas sent us an interesting article called The Myth of the Keys which talks about how Dvorak isn't really any faster than QWERTY, but the most interesting part is how this relates to the MS AntiTrust case.

Science is supposed to be impartial

This article contains some good background material, and they draw some interesting conclusions, but I can't help being sceptical because of the way they are arguing other political/philosophical points using the keyboard design as an example. It's hard to place much trust in anyone who so obviously cares that the result come out a particular way.

Unfortunately, everyone cares about keyboard design. We've all spent years learning how to type, so we have a large investment in a QWERTY layout, while those few people who've spent the even larger investment to relearn a DVORAK keyboard are extremely unlikely to turn around and admit (even if only to themselves) that this was a mistake!

It would be interesting to do a truly neutral study, using a bunch of kids who haven't yet learned either method, but despite all the research quoted in this article, it seems that nobody has actually done that! Retraining existing typists is a useful test in practical terms, but doesn't tell us anything about which is the best design in an abstract sense.

Old, bad research.

Go check out The Fable of the Fable [ccsi.com], an excellent dissection of the weak logic in this article.

The short of it - the economic discussions might be fair, but the DVORAK argument is not.

Also See...

That Dvorak keyboards are no better is old news (and has been submitted to Slashdot at least twice before), but for related interesting info see:

Typing Errors [reasonmag.com] in Reason magazine.

Network Effects, Path Dependence and Lock-In [utdallas.edu]

DISMAL SCIENCE FICTIONS Network Effects, Microsoft, and Antitrust Speculation [cato.org]

The whole catch is...

That no-one seems to have ever conducted an unbiased test. Of course, doing that is a little problematic in my opinion, as I would think you would need people who cannot type, and then train them on the various keyboards. Also, the one you learn first you might possibly be better at, and so forth.

Learning is a bitch. Once you learn one way, it's extremely hard to go to another way. Take me for example. I learned QWERTY when I was around 8 years old, and I didn't learn the "five-finger" method or anything like that. My method of typing is basically hunt and peck, with the advantage that I know from memory where the keys are. I get around 50-60 words a minute with no mistakes. I simply know my keyboard. Almost all my typing is done with 4 fingers out of 10. It generally upsets people who see me type, especially if they learned "the right way".

But that's just me and I'm odd anyway.


---

previous experience

Retraining existing typists is a useful test in practical terms, but doesn't tell us anything about which is the best design in an abstract sense.

I agree, because in retraining someone to do something another way, you get one of 3 possibilities:

1. They preferred doing it the way they were originally taught.
2. They prefer doing it the new way they were taught.
3. They prefer neither method.

Such a situation incorporates the biases of the person, and ruins the empiricality of the experiment because the person as already been tainted by previous experience! As you suggested, they should take a group of people (children, most likely) who've never been presented with a keyboard before (never seen one, anything), and teach some how to type on a QWERTY keyboard, and some on a DVORAK keyboard, and see which group is faster, etc, etc.. And then they can begin to go back and do studies on

1. People who've been taught simultaneously on both keyboard layouts
2. People who've been taught first on one, (say, QWERTY) for a specific period of time, and who were then taught on DVORAK for a certain period of time, and then see which method produces faster typing output
3. The reverse of #2, i.e., teach them first on DVORAK for the same amount of time, and then switch to teaching them on QWERTY, etc, etc.
4. and then, just for the heck of it, make a keyboard that has the keys in all the same locations, but that reads alphabetically from left to right, top to bottom, and teach an arbitrary group using that as the original keyboard they're taught on, and run similar tests to those in 1-3 with this keyboard as the focal point.

I think that once experiments like these were conducted, the greater part of the [computing] world would be eager to know the results... and we all know why...

My $0.02 worth

Dvorak vs QWERTY

Well...I've been using computers for only about 15 years or so, and typing on QWERTY layout for a bit longer. I changed to Dvorak about 6 months ago or so...it took me about a month to be back up to speed, due to the fact that I didn't want to loose my qwerty, so I was using both layouts.

The only real difference I've found between em is that I make less typos with the Dvorak (the "teh" mistake disapeared almost completely) and my wrists don't hurt much anymore (they used to hurt with qwerty after 6 or 7hr of typing).

I don't think Dvorak makes you faster, but it does make for a better typing experience, since you really use all fingers with it.

Vox, a Dvorak convert

Re:Old, bad research.

This rebuttal sets off alarms that make me suspicious of it. That's not to say the original article does not do the same, but this one is clearly problematic.

-- Numerous "quoted" "words."
-- Use of exclamation marks.
-- Proving claims by lack of evidence rather than by the presence of it.
-- Numerous unecessarily bold words.
-- Judgmental words like "spew", "aspersion", "takes a swipe at"
-- Hedge words like "probably" and "might"
-- Use of speculative "what-if" scenarios
-- Confuses number of sources with quality of conclusion
-- Relies on speculation on the motives and intentions of persons now dead
-- Uses his father as a source
-- More, but why find them?

REBUTTAL - "The Fable of the Fable"

See http://www.ccsi.com/~mbrooks/dvorak/dissent.html [ccsi.com] "The Fable of the Fable", for an extensive rebuttal and dissent.

It starts out:

The Fable of the Fable

You might hear comments from time to time about studies showing Dvorak is "no better than QWERTY," or words to that effect. All such comments that I've heard seem to echo an article, "The Fable of the Keys," by S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, published in the Journal of Law & Economics, vol. XXXIII (April 1990).

Note the word "economics." Liebowitz and Margolis are economists opposed to an "excessive inertia" theory, for which OWERTY is often cited as an example. Rather than try to prove their point with a generally valid argument, they simply attack Dvorak as a dubious replacement for QWERTY. As the article's last footnote explains, there are a number of other possible reasons for Dvorak's failure to replace QWERTY, besides a perceived lack of value. The article ignores those reasons, however, and perpetrates that false perception in a nicely self-fulfilling way.

The argument involves perception in more ways than one. If you read the article carefully, you will find that it seems to claim more than it actually does claim, especially after its implications get paraphrased a few times in conversation. Because their effect is just as powerful, I will address its implications as if they were clearly stated claims

And then goes on to thoroughly examine and refute the cited points

- Seth Finkelstein

Interesting attempt to infiltrate MS propoganda...

The aim of the keyboard piece is clearly to disprove the notion that an inferior solution can remain standard through monopoly inertia. Whether this is true in the keyboard case I don't know, but if you go up to the rest of their writing you see their purpose: to demonstrate that Microsoft's cominant position is not related to inertia and most likely arises through technical superiority.

If you go up to their page about the MS anti-trust case, they put forward some evidence that prices of software products in markets where Microsoft compete have dropped much faster than prices in markets where Microsoft does not compete. At first glance this suggests that Microsoft is not a monopoly, since monopolies usually exert their influence to keep prices inflated.

However, the reasoning is fallacious:

1. The unit production cost of software is almost zero, so the economies of scale are huge. Software which sells lots of copies should sell at a tiny fraction of the price of specialist software.
2. Microsoft exercises its monopoly position in one main market: the OS. Its income from this market is so huge that it can afford to loss-lead products in other markets. Thus MS may provide a downward pressure on products in some markets, but only by inflating prices in another market.
3. The trend for MS monpoly product, its OS, is upward, not downward, despite the increase in the market.
4. Becuase of the huge economies of scale, it may in the past have proven beneficial in terms of price to have a single provider rather than paying many copies to duplicate effort. But the cost of lack of competition is lack of innovation.
5. The market is now so huge that software prices are essentially being driven to zero for the most used software. Microsoft's pricing, with the exception of internet explorer, does not reflect this trend.
6. The only software markets in which Microsoft does not compete are either specialised, or fast turnover (games). In these markets the huge economies of scale are not realised, and so the pricing is not expected to fall in the same way.

Re:Science is supposed to be impartial

``We've all spent years learning how to type, so we have a large investment in a QWERTY layout, while those few people who've spent the even larger investment to relearn a DVORAK keyboard are extremely unlikely to turn around and admit (even if only to themselves) that this was a mistake!''

Sounds like human nature to me. Rare is the person who spends a lot of effort learning something like that and then turns around and says (either to themselves or out loud): ``Hey! What a waste of time that was!''.

Consider people you know who have invested a considerable amount of time and/or money becoming proficient in a particular activity and think about how open they are to different ways of doing things. For example,

• People who've climbed the learning curve for UNIX and how they feel about people who only know point-and-click WinXX users.
• Drivers who took the time to drive a standard transmission and what they think about automatics.
• People who go out and buy exotic speakers for big bucks and insist that they sound so much better than yours even though hideously expensive test equipment can barely measure the difference in sound.
• Psychiatrists who spends years studying a particular method of analysis and dismiss anyone who studied any other method.
• ...

I don't think we have to work very hard to think of many more examples.

Question: If Dvorak was supposed to be easier to use how come I had so damned much trouble back when I remapped my keyboard with Prokey and mvoed all my keycaps? And, since, I never really learned how to type (I consider my typing ability something like advanced ``hunting and pecking''.) it couldn't have been having to ``unlearn'' an old typing technique.