A comparison of QWERTY and alphabetical layout on small handheld devices

Abstract

The QWERTY keyboard layout is originally designed to solve problems occurred in mechanical typewriters rather than the digital devices. The dis-ordered characters are not appearing in the order the user learns the alphabetic order. Hence, novice users need to learn the device until improving the typing performance to the acceptable level. Designing the key arrangement in a keyboard needs to consider balancing the load between the right and left hand and the fingers, distance between the keys, size of the key and frequency of character. However, some of these parameters are not applicable for designing key layout for small handheld devices. Hence, we intend to study the usability effect of QWERTY layout in comparison with alphabetically order layout. We measured the typing speed using QWERTY layout as well as alphabetical layout that we developed in the virtual keyboard for the experiment. Ten expert users have been selected for the evaluation and we run five tests with each test-user. We measured the typing speed in character per second then adjusted against the error. The adjusted character per second for both key layouts was 0.52 acps. This typing speed was improved in the fifth pass to be 0.78 acps and 0.68 acps for the alphabetical and QWERTY layout respectively. Regarding accuracy, during the first run 96.279% for the alphabetical and 97.674% accuracy for the QWERTY layout has been recorded. While the users were more accurate on the QWERTY than the alphabetical layout during the first run, this was changed after the fifth run having 98.837% accuracy for the alphabetical and 98.372% accuracy for the QWERTY layout.