The Promise and Peril of ‘Smart’ Keyboards

[OZCUBAN]

THE MEDIUM

The Promise and Peril of ‘Smart’ Keyboards

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Published: 15 August 2010

Analog culture is stored in our muscle memories. Even as artifacts of the predigital world disappear, we haven’t forgotten the moves. How to crank up a car window. How to ease up on a clutch. How to put a needle on a record.

Among the 20th-century activities our muscles can’t forget is typing on a qwerty keyboard. And though most people who type now don’t know the meaning of a typebar jam — much less the inky aggravation — the configuration of characters that begins with the row q-w-e-r-t-y-u-i-o-p, first marketed for typewriters in 1874 to reduce such jams, is still the most common configuration in the world for English-language keyboards.

For 136 years, then, typing in English has meant making certain neurological associations. Words exist in our minds and on our tongues, but they also live in our hands and fingers. Anyone who types envisions and feels words in space, and for English speakers who use technology, this space is defined by the qwerty keyboard. Who knows what qwerty has done to the language — even to modes of thought — by attaching meaning to certain constellations? Deep in our typist-minds, G and H are centrally located and somehow siblings; X and Z are southwestern outliers; and Q is always followed by . . . W.

But maybe qwerty is finally on its way out. This will be good news to many designers who believe that bullheaded commitment to qwerty is holding up a revolution in interface design that should have started with the touch screen. The trusty layout still appears on nearly all English-language typewriters, computers and smartphones with hardware keyboards, but smartphones and tablet devices with touch-screen keypads (like the Android and the iPhone) now default to a layout that looks like qwerty but doesn’t work like qwerty at all.

I first discovered the implications of a gut-renovated qwerty while using Google on the iPad. When you’re about to enter a search term, an abbreviated keypad that features the qwerty configuration of letters appears. But instead of the word “Return” or “Enter” on the big key midway down the right side of the keypad, the key reads “Search.” That’s quietly amazing. The keypad changes under your fingers. The same is true when you type in the “To” and “Cc” field of the iPad’s Mail program. Suddenly the @ sign is prominent on the keypad, as well as the hyphen and underscore, two symbols common in e-mail addresses. Similarly, when you’re typing into the address bar of the Safari browser, the custom keypad that comes up features no spacebar — spaces don’t go into Web addresses — and there’s a new, freestanding “.com” key.

The iPad keyboard, like other touch-screen keyboards, is also elaborately “chorded.” Press one designated key, and the whole keyset changes. One board has qwerty letters and first-tier punctuation (comma, period), a second board is numbers and second-most-used punctuation (semicolon, parentheses) and a third is important symbols (dollar sign, percent sign).

Skills with qwerty won’t help you with such sophisticated chording; you’ll have to learn to type again. In fact, the chording produces so many possibilities and the keys are so shape-shifting that the technology press produces guides with names like “71 iPad Keyboard Keys You Probably Didn’t Know Existed.”

Preserving signifiers from the analog world while changing their meaning — having touch-screen displays that look like keys but are really responsive mini-apps — introduces excitement but also unease. I discovered this while playing an online board game on PBSkids.org called Bring It. The game offers players a chance to advance by answering basic math questions on cards that seem to come from a deck.

My kindergartner son and I have played Bring It dozens of times. For a board game, it’s remarkably tear free. It always delivers a satisfyingly close finish; no one ever gets trounced in Bring It. I came to suspect the reason: the deck of cards is rigged. If a player answers math questions correctly, the deck changes so he will draw more-challenging cards and stay interested. A player who misses questions doesn’t draw the hard cards so he won’t become frustrated. With the deck rigged in this charitable way, the players generally cross the finish line almost together.

By e-mail, Laura Nooney and Gentry Menzel, who have worked on Bring It, told me that this and many other games on PBSkids.org are programmed to be “self-leveling” and rise or fall in difficulty depending on the histories of the players.

“In a virtual-game environment,” Nooney and Menzel wrote, “we know the behavior and pattern of success of our players and can cater the game to the needs or level of challenge most appropriate for that individual player.” Referring to the Bring It flash cards, they said that “the game knows whether you’ve answered a particular question correctly and will only give you the next most difficult question in that category if your answer was correct.” (On the phone, Kevin Lesniewicz, the lead developer of the game, said of Bring It, “It’s like a simple form of artificial intelligence.”)

Like the “Enter” key that becomes a “Search” key, the self-leveling card deck may at first seem trivial. But it’s also a sly way that digital technology that uses real-world iconography destabilizes experience. What, after all, is a more recognizable symbol of the capriciousness of life than a deck of cards, out of which your fate is randomly dealt? And yet here the deck icon is only superficial. At heart it’s not a random-card generator but the opposite: a highly wrought program with a memory, an algorithm and a mandate to keep children in the game. An app posing as a spatiotemporal object.

As a populous commercial precinct, the Web now changes in response to our individual histories with it. Like a party that subtly reconfigures with each new guest, the Web now changes its ads, interfaces and greetings for almost every user. Some people find this eerie. But it’s nowhere near as shiver-worthy as the discovery that digital “things” — apps carefully dressed as objects — change as we use them, too. And it’s weird enough when those things are being solicitous and cooperative. What if the keyboards and decks of cards all turn on us? Let’s not think about that, not yet.

A HIGHER KEY

Ready to quit qwerty? For the Android, try Swype, which lets you slide fingers from letter to letter instead of jabbing them, or ThickButtons, which enlarges needed keys as you go. Demos of these and related programs are at swypeinc.com and thickbuttons.com .

ARTIFICIAL LUCK

Games that challenge kids’ brains without breaking their hearts are not easy to find. The games at PBSkids.org are designed to “prevent boredom and frustration,” meaning what looks like good luck might be a PBS guardian angel in the machine.

PICTURE THIS

Hey, you don’t need qwerty if you give up words altogether. Try the highly visual language of icon messaging with awesome apps like Emoji or Zlango: a guy with a Pinocchio nose means “deceive”; a guy with spread arms means “much.”

OZ this amazing stuff the world is changing right before our eyes I would say I am reasonable on a qwerty key board but I am not against newer ways of doing things ie apples gesture system for some of their devices we are all capable of re learning

[dicko]

nerd!

[CanuckSARTech]

Thanks, but no.

I'll stay with my very-happy-to-have-achieved 68 to 72 words-per-minute on my standard QWERTY keyboard.

It's a system that has worked perfectly for over a century.

Apple/iPhone, Android/Google can all kiss my hairy behind - they just want to develop the "next great thing" so that they can get royalty-type payments for untold years.

Don't mess with a perfect system.

Remember when Sony messed with CD's and tried to come out with the MiniDisc? Or how about when the LaserDisc came out? Virtual-reality goggles anyone? Or....wait for it....the new 3D technology for home theatre use - just give it 5 years. Trust me.

[MIKA27]

Wow, that's one HUGE post on keyboards Steve!

You know me, I'm all for technology, I tend to but loads of new tech each year and whilst technology is stepping up at a very fast rate, I still love a QWERTY any day. Hopefully one day the keyboard will be a thing of the past and touch screens and the like more common.

I really believe that by the time my grand kids are at school (And my sons only 2) things would have really changed.

[Cletus]

Where I work a couple of the enginerds remap their keyboards to a Dvorak layout. Makes working on their PCs impossible until they switch it back.

Or maybe I'm being an ugly American by assuming the rest of the world uses a QWERTY layout?

[Leopolis Semper Fidelis]

Stick with QWERTY - if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

[MrGlass]

I looked at implementing a Dvorak keyboard on my laptop at one stage, as I was unable to use my left hand for a period of months and it was a better design for one hand. Gave up when I realised I couldn't change all of the keys on the keyboard.

I always thought that the coolest keyboards were those projection ones. Can't imagine typing on one though - there is nothing quite like the feeling you get from the feedback and sound of a nice keyboard.