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Comfort of Popularity vs. Usability: Bucking the Trend
Posted By : Tom Schaetzle Posted On : March 1st, 2010
Topics : Application Development, Design, Uncategorized, User Experience Design
Dvorak Simplified Keyboard
What would happen if, out of nowhere, a company came out with a better MP3 player than Apple? Better storage, more functions, etc. for a better price? Well, it’s happened. Multiple times. Some competing MP3 players offer all of these superiorities, but have failed to achieve the prestige of the Apple iPod due to its seemingly ever-increasing popularity. There are multiple reasons why the iPod has managed to own the competition, including – but not limited to – visual appeal of the product and the huge advantage that Apple has developed in advertising. Even if a product comes out on the market that is proven to be superior to the iPod, there’s a good chance it won’t surpass Apple’s stronghold on the mind of consumers as a whole.
A parallel can be drawn to the existence of a keyboard you might not be familiar with. The modern keyboard layout was created before computers even existed so as to prevent typewriters jamming. While the “QWERTY” layout (the most common modern keyboard) did indeed solve this relative annoyance, there was a concern about the fact that there existed only one vowel on the home row, a feature that still exists today. While effective in its purpose, the need for the layout of QWERTY was rendered moot by computers, machines that don’t have to be concerned with jamming in the same manner of typewriters. However, consumers had gotten extremely comfortable using the QWERTY, and it was perhaps inevitable that electronic keyboards would have the same character layout. Even today, the vast majority of the computer-using population uses a very slight variation of the original QWERTY. Look down at your hands, and there’s an exceedingly good chance that on the home row (middle row of letters), you will find exactly one vowel: “A.” One row up the first six letters will probably be Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The remnant of the typewriter-dominant past still exists.
Despite the fact that QWERTY prevented mechanical jamming on typewriters, there were concerns about the layout of the letters and the strain that was placed on hands during the action of typing. A different keyboard was created in the 1930s – the “DVORAK” – according to what letters were utilized most often and the way that people physically type; the most common characters are more accessible in DVORAK, and the lesser used are placed in more remote areas of the board. A, O, E, U and I are all on the home row, for example. Everything about the DVORAK points to superiority over the QWERTY. But, although the DVORAK is easier to get a hold of now than it was thirty years ago, the QWERTY still has the market by the throat. Yes, it would take you a bit of time to get used to the DVORAK, but carpel tunnel would be much less of a concern for you than it is now. Your efficiency would more than likely see a noticeable increase. But the QWERTY is what we are, as a whole, most comfortable with. The QWERTY, like the iPod, is what we use despite evidence that we should move on to the DVORAK, the usability pioneer in the keyboard world.
We at Galvin Technologies like to think of ourselves as the DVORAK of website usability. It’d be easy for us to go the same route as everybody else and design websites according to the QWERTY layout the industry has provided us, but we choose to take a step or two out of the box. We don’t want to completely buck the trend, and do pay close attention to the requirements of business models, but try to take into effect usability aspects: the QWERTY vs. the DVORAK. Just as the DVORAK was created with the user in mind, we design websites with the users in mind. The QWERTY was useful when it was necessary, but it’s time to move on; sometimes it’s better to come up with something new and a little different, more user-friendly, than continue to follow a trend of blatant usability inferiority.
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