Are common typing errors ever considered as a metric or design tool when evaluating new keyboard layouts? Same-finger, alternating-hand, finger travel and so on are all commonly used, but I wonder if studying the frequency and types of errors would be of use? I guess it is a lot more subjective but still of interest. For instance, I read that colemak has a lot of same-hand, while dvorak has a lot of alternating hand. How is this related to a transposition typo (getting two letters in the wrong order).. I am willing to bet that there is a correlation. My guess is that a specific layout influences the kinds of typos produced, since our hands are likely to fail or be weak in certain motions. If this is taken into account, we could get keyboard layouts which are easier to be more accurate on, if this is allowed to influence the letter placement. Common diagraphs should be moved away from positions which are error-prone. Anyone know if this kind of research has already been carried out?
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Typing errors as design tool?
- Started by innovine
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Not to my knowledge, no. I agree that it is an interesting field of study, but it'd be hard to get right I believe. There have to be a lot of individual variation concerning typos I think. And in my experience it matters how you've learnt your new (or old) layout as you may have picked up some habits that become hard to break. Some people have some errors that become quite persistent for them and while they might be able to focus on and eliminate these it's not always done.
My most common errors are transpositions: Mixing up two letters, usually within a word (I just typed 'wihtin' for instance). I've no idea whether that happens more on rolls or on hand alterations, but my impression is that there are other things at play.
My error rate was higher with Dvorak than it is with Colemak, but I don't think that says much about the layouts.
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Maybe a good part of all errors that you have come from muscle memory of the previous layout you used and while it would be possible to design a new layout based only on minimizing errors it might be difficult to achieve good results in ergonomy at the same time.
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Lillian Malt, the designer of the Maltron layout reports in her paper (page 6) that vowel conflation is a source of 49% of all errors; the claim is attributed to Dvorak's book. Maltron avoids vowels on adjacent keys for that reason ("e" is on a thumb key).
If you search on google scholar, there seems to be plenty of studies of errors by touch typists. Unfortunately, most are from the 60s and 70s, and so not available online.
I'm very impressed that you guys all no what your common errors are – I try to think about it and find out I have no idea!
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