Today, most of us are exposed to the QWERTY keyboard, which is the keyboard with the six keys Q, W, E, R, T and Y in the top left corner of the letter area, a layout that originated back in the days of typewriters. But what may be unexpected is that the QWERTY keyboard was originally designed to make typing more difficult and less efficient. This was because typewriters of the time would jam if typed too fast.
“More than 60 years later, in 1936, August Dvorak and William Dealey invented a new keyboard layout that placed the most frequently used keys where they would be most easily touched by the fingers, minimizing finger movement.
Specifically, the four fingers of the left hand are placed on the four vowels A, O, E, and U, next to the ‘I’, because, as the vowels are the most commonly used letters in typing, there is less finger movement in this layout.
The Dvorak keyboard layout option is available in both Windows and Mac, and since iOS 16, this mobile operating system has also introduced support for Dvorak.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was so pleased about this that he said he spent five hours learning to use the Dvorak keyboard on a flight to Tokyo in 1993 and hasn’t bothered with QWERTY since.
Of course, the way you hit a keyboard on a mobile phone is different from a PC, so Dvorak is not necessarily more efficient than QWERTY, depending on what you’re used to.
