{"id":43,"date":"2007-11-21T13:46:21","date_gmt":"2007-11-21T17:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/2007\/11\/21\/the-qwerty-problem-for-software\/"},"modified":"2007-11-21T13:46:21","modified_gmt":"2007-11-21T17:46:21","slug":"the-qwerty-problem-for-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/the-qwerty-problem-for-software\/","title":{"rendered":"The QWERTY problem for software"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My friend Paul Baier was ranting about the new menus in Office 2007:\u00a0 &#8220;they changed everything!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It seems that widely used apps like Office have run into the QWERTY problem. \u00a0 The <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/QWERTY#History_and_purposes\">QWERTY keyboard<\/a> is <strong>not <\/strong>the best UI for touch typing &#8212; in fact, it was deliberately designed to minimize jamming problems on mechanical typewriters.\u00a0 The <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard\">Dvorak keyboard<\/a> is generally acknowledged to be superior, BUT hasn&#8217;t been <em>superior enough <\/em>to displace QWERTY in the market.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a lesson here for software designers:\u00a0 if you have an app with a large installed base, consider that your current UI might be &#8220;good enough&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My friend Paul Baier was ranting about the new menus in Office 2007:\u00a0 &#8220;they changed everything!&#8221; It seems that widely used apps like Office have run into the QWERTY problem. \u00a0 The QWERTY keyboard is not the best UI for &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/the-qwerty-problem-for-software\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}