Comment Dvorak pros and cons (Score 2) 263
From the article: "Ergonomists point out that QWERTY's bad points (such as unbalanced loads on left and right hand; excess loading on the top row) are outweighed by presumably accidental benefits..."
Since when are accidental benefits a justification for bad design?
I decided a while ago that I should switch to Dvorak, after reading about it quite a while. At the time I had developed tendonitis in both my wrists, thanks to the job I was working. I can say that i agree 100%. The Dvorak keyboard *feels* so much easier to to type on. Your hands feel "lazy" almost, compared to the amount of work they do on a QWERTY. I even went so far as to pry all the keys off of my keyboard and rearrange them. All in all it took me about 6 weeks to get up to speed on Dvorak, and I can say that it was a definate improvement over QWERTY. It really felt like there was a plan behind the layout of the keys, instead of feeling like you were accomidating someone's arbitrary decision.
In the end, I had to switch back as my new line of work found me working on different computers all the time, most of which didn't belong to me. It took me about a week and a half to convert back.
Since when are accidental benefits a justification for bad design?
I decided a while ago that I should switch to Dvorak, after reading about it quite a while. At the time I had developed tendonitis in both my wrists, thanks to the job I was working. I can say that i agree 100%. The Dvorak keyboard *feels* so much easier to to type on. Your hands feel "lazy" almost, compared to the amount of work they do on a QWERTY. I even went so far as to pry all the keys off of my keyboard and rearrange them. All in all it took me about 6 weeks to get up to speed on Dvorak, and I can say that it was a definate improvement over QWERTY. It really felt like there was a plan behind the layout of the keys, instead of feeling like you were accomidating someone's arbitrary decision.
In the end, I had to switch back as my new line of work found me working on different computers all the time, most of which didn't belong to me. It took me about a week and a half to convert back.
