I’ve actually never seen a research study which answered any of the numerous questions I have about keyboard letter layouts. Alas. (I’ve skimmed several hundred keyboard-related papers.) Most of my questions about general keyboard shape and positioning are also unaddressed by the literature, and my best answers are my own study of human anatomy mixed with reasoning and testing ideas on myself.
But, in conjunction with the core idea presented here (namely, to measure efficiency via counting dictionary words that can be typed using only home keys),
The author of that blog,
Proword has written quite a bit of interesting stuff here at geekhack about his workflow/setup. Since he types using the Maltron keyboard and Malt’s layout, it stands to reason that he agrees with Malt’s design criteria. As he says though, “I don't for one moment hold that this is the only desideratum for assessing if a key distribution is ergonomic or not, but in my view it's certainly a very good starting point.”
Indeed, it’s one reasonable place to start, but I think the only way to make a fully optimized keyboard layout is to analyze multi-letter strings, breaking words down into chunks which are easy to type as a single motion, and then analyzing the difficulty of transition between chunks. None of the heuristics I’ve seen used to analyze keyboards get this right, focusing too much on individual letters and key distances.
Since I'm looking to build some sort of ergo keyboard for myself in the near future, I want to collect these ideas and share them here.
Poke around the Geekhack ergonomics subforum a bit. There’s been a lot of interesting discussion here in the past few years.
What could you possibly conclude from such a study ?
One conclusion I have: 180° rotated QWERTY on a grid layout keyboard is really bad for one finger typing. :-)