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Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype

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Re: Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype

#41

Post by hobarrera »

blister wrote: post #7

This was a fascinating article. The first thing that jumped out at me when I reached the end was "there's no way this would ever work." I am a Swype user and love the product, but I'm reasonably fast at typing on it because I know the QWERTY layout like the back of my hand. Switching to a new layout would bring me back to a crawl. I'd probably be better off typing on a 9-digit pre-smartphone keypad at that point. Coo…

Being used to qwerty you (and I) would probably take months, maybe even a few years to get used to change.

But people who are only now getting into tech (and kids) can learn this layout as a first layout. Within a generation, it's possible to have people using entirely this ultra-efficient keyboard.

IMHO, the only downside, is that it does not take into consideration non-english. I use the same keyboard for English/Spanish, but I suspect that the new layout will not perform equally well on all latin-derived languages that currently use the same qwerty layout.

Re: Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype

#42

Post by hobarrera »

edent wrote: post #32

Fascinating - although I wonder if you're missing a trick by not looking at misspellings? I often don't know how to correctly spell a word. On T9 it can be difficult to get a prediction if you don't know how many Cs & Ss there are in "necessary". I find that SwiftKey (through which this comment is typed) is very good at correcting my showing as I swipe.

THB, no keyboard can really overcame a user who can't spell. Much like a pen can't overcome users who can't write, and dictation engines can't overcome users who can't talk.

Re: Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype

#43

Post by NoGravitas »

The article and the paper are a nice find that I plan to share on the Colemak forum.

One thing I've found is that a layout that is highly optimized for touch typing is terrible for swiping. I touch-type Colemak on hardware keyboards; for those who don't know, it's a layout optimized for fast and ergonomic typing in English (there are variants for some other languages), without being as different from QWERTY as Dvorak is. SwiftKey supports Colemak out of the box for English, so I tried it. I normally use SwiftKey Flow for writing long bits of text on my tablet.

My experience with Flow and Colemak was that the rate of errors was much higher -- there were far more ambiguities, mainly because many of the most common letters are on the home row (arst neio), and so you're often just swiping back and forth across the home row, which could mean anything. You also end up having to swipe farther, because of more lateral movement from one end of the keyboard to the other, and less top-to-bottom movement.

I'd be interested in hearing the experiences of anyone who's tried swiping on a Dvorak layout.

One final note, if anyone hasn't seen MessageEase, they should check it out. It's a compelely different model for typing that involves a very compact and optimized layout to minimize finger movement, as well as a mixture of tapping and swiping. If it had the benefit of SwiftKey's language model, I'd use it for everything, but as it stands, I use it mainly where completion is not available (e.g. in terminal sessions).

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