Welcome to Geekhack!
The problems of the
QWERTY keyboard are well known.
The first "ergonomic keyboard" that I know of is the
Burboa Type Writing Machine, US patent 1089689 Mar 10, 1914. Several ergonomic keyboards throughout the years have similiar layouts -- whether they know it or not.
Several alternative
logicallayouts -- but still for the
physical layout of the
QWERTY keyboard have emerged:
Dvorak,
Colemak,
Dhiatensor etc.. and many of them in the age of the typewriter.
When computers emerged and became popular in the 1970's, there were many studies on which properties that were desirable. You may find those papers and book under the heading
Human-Computer Interaction, but I'll tell you the most important finding: feedback is very important. The need for accurate feedback will not go away.
People type faster and more accurately if they can feel the keys before pressing them, feel when the key has actuated and .. if they can
hear when it has actuated. Those properties are why so many members here like "clicky" keyboards with full-sized keys, abhor flat, "chiclet" keyboards .. and sneer at touch screens.
Many of the properties of so-called "ergonomic" keyboards have emerged not to make typing faster, but because of medical problems that the typists have developed:
Repetitive Strain Injury,
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome etc.
Some members here are very good at identifying problems with keyboards themselves and to construct new, more ergonomic keyboards. Just search for the
Symmetric Stagger board, the
Humber Hacker keyboard and the
Key64.
My personal quest is to build "The ergonomic keyboard for the rest of us": which incorporates what I have learned about keyboard ergonomics into a keyboard that looks more like a "standard" keyboard and which you don't need to be able to touch-type to use it.
One problem with keyboards, on a higher level, is that today we use both a keyboard and a mouse, and it is a hurdle to switch between them.
Because of this, you can often see people "hunt and peck" with the left hand on the keyboard and rest the right hand on the mouse. That may work for some applications but not when you need to type a lot.
Part of the problem is that there is a lot of distance between the main keyboard and the mouse. The keyboard layout that is dominant today was introduced by IBM with its
Model M .. before the mouse. Cursor keys and numeric keys were to the right of the main keyboard. IBM had been influenced by DEC. DEC's keyboards were part of bulky "terminals" where the small monitor was on the left side inside the unit with the main keyboard centered in front of the monitor. That made DEC put any extra keys on the right side where there was space.
The solutions that we have seen for this include: smaller keyboards w/o extra keys to the right, so called "left-handed keyboards" with the extra keys to the left, keyboards where the left-hand keys are
on the mouse, trackpoint or trackball in the middle of the keyboard,
Rollermouse, trackpad,
Mousetracker (mechanical trackpad) and one-handed keyboards such as the
Matias Half Keyboard,
Frogpad, etc.
Also, today we not only type, point and click. We also scroll a lot. There are keyboard models today that have scrollwheels, (even though scrollwheels are relative to mouse focus and not keyboard focus). We also use the cursor/Home/End/PageUp/PageDown keys for scrolling. This is also something that you could focus on.