By taking away space from the keys on a touchscreen keyboard, an inventor claims that users find them paradoxically more accurate. Instead of square or rectangular keys that bump up against each other, he’s designed a “crocodile” layout — with triangular keys and lots of unused space between the onscreen buttons.
Faced as I am with the dual challenge of a tiny touchscreen smartphone and a set of fat, sausage-like fingers, I’m intrigued but skeptical.
Here’s a mockup of his keyboard on an iphone, from an article in The Register:
My initial impression is that maybe — maybe — you’ll get fewer wrong keys pressed. But you’ll also end up pressing dead spots a lot of the time, so your rate of “good presses” might also go down. In other words, he’s made it lots harder to hit the wrong key — but also somewhat harder to hit the right key.
Interesting! Although, I would argue that accuracy is less important with smartphones, and hitting dead spots would be infuriating and possibly reduce speed. I’d rather type something and have it fixed by predictive text than shoot blanks until I figured out where the triangle-shaped “P” is.
This is odd for me to say because I hated predictive text for several years until I bought a smartphone – I could never get the damn thing to work properly. My current phone is incredibly user friendly – if I botch a word, a little bubble pops up that suggests a different one. If the predicted word is correct, all i have to do is keep typing. If it isn’t, I press a little “x” beside the word and make another attempt at typing the word properly. The predictive text seems to learn things that may not be in its dictionary, such as last names and drunken slang.