Yes, QWERTY is Awkward, so Why Can’t We Make it Better?

New designs need to be far superior to overcome a good-enough incumbent; and Dvorak is not it.

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Barbara Blackburn, a holder of the Guinness World Record for typing speed, was not amused by David Letterman’s gimmicks when she was invited to his show in 1985.

Letterman set her up with a typewriter in front of his live audience. Blackburn had recorded speeds of 212 words per minute, while most professionals struggled to achieve 80-100 words per minute. So, Letterman, as usual, wanted to see the spectacle. He challenged her to type a section from the Official Baseball Rules 1984 Edition for one minute.

Halfway into the demonstration, the host peered over her shoulder. There were giggles in the audience. Letterman pointed out the typewriter was missing paper. “I guess it’s easy to say you’re [the] fastest when there’s no way to prove it, is there?” Letterman said. Blackburn was a good sport about it, and readied for another attempt. This time, however, the result was even more embarrassing for her.

When Blackburn’s fingers were done speeding across the typewriter, Letterman held the sheet of paper to the camera: it was gibberish. “Something has happened,” she said on the show, struggling with why her typing read nonsense.

Barbara Blackburn, like most fast typists, used a technique called touch-typing. It relies only on muscle memory, not sight. Not having to look at the keyboard lets the typists read from another document and transcribe it without having to switch their gaze back and forth. Since she wasn’t looking at her work, Blackburn didn’t notice either of the errors that Letterman derided.

Besides touch-typing, there was a second technique that she also relied on. Blackburn used a Dvorak Simplified keyboard, which arranges keys differently than the QWERTY keyboard that has been the standard for over a century.

QWERTY Arrived First (It’s Old)

The ubiquity of QWERTY keyboards and the relative obscurity of the Dvorak keyboard are instances of path dependence, a phenomenon studied by evolutionary biologists, economists, and political scientists. The conventional narrative goes that QWERTY is the standard keyboard format, despite its many shortcomings, solely because it happened to be widely used first.

My opinion is that there’s more to it: no alternative to QWERTY has emerged that is better by enough. As you’ll see later in this piece, Blackburn's unfortunate attempt at showing her superior typing skills on the big stage was an inevitable outcome of the nature of typing itself. And that is emblematic of why the Dvorak keyboard hasn’t unseated QWERTY (and relieving all of us from its pains).

First, a quick historic recap; QWERTY was first chosen in the 1870s by placing commonly occurring combinations of keys farther apart on the keyboard. As a result, typists wouldn’t jam the typewriters by hitting the keystrokes too rapidly in succession, in effect slowing them down. Ergonomics were not factored in either. QWERTY leads to more frequent use of the left hand and awkward movements of fingers for some frequently occurring words.

The closest competitor, developed by August Dvorak, an American educational psychologist, in 1932 was designed especially for fast touch-typists. Its proponents point out that its layout places common keystrokes within easier access, evenly uses both hands, and minimizes how much fingers have to travel.

On the Letterman show, Blackburn cited a statistic claiming that on a regular day, her fingers would travel 15 miles across a QWERTY keyboard if she used one, but the task on the Dvorak keyboard would be just one mile. In other interviews, she claimed that her typing skills were far inferior on a QWERTY keyboard, which had begun her clerical training on. However, once she switched to Dvorak, her speeds and accuracy increased. She was unbeaten in the Guinness book until they discontinued that category in the early 2000s.

Path Dependence is Hard (Not Impossible) to Beat

However, such anecdotal successes have not translated into any meaningful uptake for that alternative layout. And path dependence could surely have had a role.

The historical path an idea, technology, design, or organism follows helps determine its eventual form and function, even if some of its features may no longer be helpful. A lilac bush that grows close to an aging maple tree would need to bend itself away from the shade of large branches. Years later, even if the maple falls away from decay, and the lilac can grow straight upwards, its hardened stem will preserve the bends of its past.

QWERTY’s persistence is surely owed in large part to two intertwined mechanisms of path dependence: feedback effects and high short-term costs of switching.

Feedback effects work when an idea influences its environment to reinforce itself. Software, which uses the keyboard more creatively than a typewriter can, was built around QWERTY. Shortcuts like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V helped copy and paste text easily using the letters C and V that are next to each other. In the last decade, swipe-texting has become common on smartphones, both fortifying the muscle memory and relieving some of its aches.

Having to relearn to type on a new layout is slow and cumbersome, and such high near-term costs that have prolonged QWERTY’s dominance. Businesses, for instance, have to contend with immediate loss in productivity for the potential of an eventual increase in efficiency. In almost 100 years since Dvorak, few have made that switch.

So, is path dependence unbeatable? Does it entrench designs so irreversibly that typing has been terrible for 150 years but still can’t be improved?

Not quite; there are at least a couple of ways such entrenched incumbents can be replaced by new ones.

• The first and most obvious one is the availability of a much better solution. In 2006, the social media pioneer MySpace was the world’s most visited website, and in 2009 it had 115 million users. That’s enough to create large feedback effects. Facebook, though, with its much more personalized (and addictive) designs managed to drive it into obscurity, and has entrenched itself instead.

• The second is a more gradual approach, with a more benevolent example. I recently wrote about how the Affordable Care Act, by creating online insurance marketplaces, opened up a new alternative to America’s otherwise antiquated employer-sponsored health insurance system.

Fitter designs and new stepwise paths to alternatives can shake up the status quo.

Dvorak isn’t Better by Enough

Yes, QWERTY is awkward and yes, it is cemented in place, but nothing has dislodged it primarily because there hasn’t been anything that’s superior enough.

A few days after Blackburn appeared on his show, Letterman launched an “investigation” into the matter. His team slowed down video of the demonstration, which showed that, perhaps out of nervousness, on the second attempt, Blackburn’s right hand mistakenly shifted one key over to the right. All letters typed from her left hand were accurate, but ones typed with the right hand were off by one place, garbling the words.

While an error like that is not unique to Dvorak, and could have as easily occurred with QWERTY, that is precisely the point. Typing is a complex coordination exercise that takes years of practice and continued attention for precision. Those factors, the muscle memory and skill, are stronger determinants of performance, than the nature of the keyboard used. While particularly painful keyboard layouts can exist, for most people, good enough is good enough. And QWERTY fits that.

To add to that, there are doubts about the presumed superiority of Dvorak itself. While some studies have found that a Dvorak keyboard is more efficient and can be used to train typists to be faster, others found little or no difference between it and QWERTY. Even if Dvorak is a better keyboard design, it doesn’t appear to offer either of the two paths outlined above, to fight QWERTY’s stronghold.

As someone interested in developing new technologies for a better future, I remind myself of this often. Novel solutions don’t just need to be better in more than one dimension, they need to offer a reasonable path to fighting the inertia of yesterday.

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Notes:

1. Barbara Blackburn on the Letterman Show:

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout