That’s the Dvorak keyboard, and by all (well, most) accounts you can touchtype significantly faster on one of those than you can on a qwerty keyboard. The persistence of the qwerty keyboard is the poster child for the idea of economic path dependence – a story first told by Paul David. According to David, the qwerty keyboard was developed back when typewriters looked like this:

And the reason for the less efficient placement of the keys was to prevent having the typebars jam as they came up to strike the page. qwerty persisted despite the development of more efficient layouts for the keys. This made sense as long as typewriters had typebars, but what about after the development of roller heads? And, more importantly, what about after we started typing on computers? Surely once the threat of jamming is gone, we really want the keyboard with the most efficient layout, don’t we?

Apparently we don’t. David’s hypothesis is that the cost of teaching all of the touchtypists to use new keyboards is so high that using qwerty is locked in. So the path our current technology follows depends on history – hence path dependence.

I was reminded of this yesterday while I was reading Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin. In that, he talks about the importance of developing ideas for which there is a vacuum – in other words, ideas for parts of the product space that aren’t already taken up. What he’s basically saying is that when you’re innovating, you don’t want to fight path dependence. In fact, if you find empty enough spaces to work in, you can actually create path dependence that favours your new idea.

So when we’re innovating, we want to look for the vacuum.

And of course, the answer to the original question is that since no one is touch-typing on smartphones, what we really need there is the keyboard layout that is the most familiar…

(photo from flickr/John Ong under a creative commons license)