Interaction design

A revolutionary way of creating messages is called Swype. The company founders Cliff Kushler and Randy Marsden with their team have developed a system that recognizes words when you slide over the qwerty keyboard with your fingers. Instead of typing the words, like hardware keyboards this is a touch screen. When you want to write a word you simply connect the dots and the program will recognize the word.

QWERTY history

This reminds us about the QWERTY keyboard history. Originally Christopher Sholes developed another keboard layout for the first type writers. He had problems with the first designs however; typists were so fast that the key got stuck into each other, causing a jam. The solution was simple but with great consequences; reorder the layout in a less logical way to keep typists from typing too fast. Other systems such as the ‘Dvorak keyboard’ can type around 400 of the most common words in English without leaving the middle row while the QWERTY keyboard can only reach up till 100. Another statistic; the middle row of the Dvorak system do 70% of the work while QWERTY only does 32%.

Future

It is clear that with the Swype system people can write their text messages quicker and it has a lot of potential as the system can be used on tablets, phones, televisions etc. It is likely we are stuck with the inefficient QWERTY system as it has become the standard for most users. It would be nice if Swype would be even faster with a new keyboard lay out – dreaming mode off.

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