Digits on a telephone’s keypad and keyboard arrangements of numbers (the right-hand-side of standard keyboards) are inconsistent in terms of layout. Have you ever wondered why? I sure has to stop and ponder myself . I tried to flip the telephone upside down to achieve consistency, to no avail. The zero ends up at the wrong end (top) and the whole ‘image’ is reversed; “mirrored”, to be precise.

Isn’t such layout supposed to be standardised for the user’s sake? It definitely simplifies habits and make keypresses more instinctive. There must be some historical motives. The pulse phone and the dial probably predate computer keyboards. In other words, tone dialling with the modern one-stroke input came after computers, so could possibly inherit the same, perfectly-acceptable layout.

Most of us can switch easily between the two layouts. Many use both the phone and the ‘NumLock setting’ on for numerical data entry (highly popular among accountants). I hear that the same arguments apply to alternative layouts of characters, e.g. Dvorak keyboard layout, which need not necessarily interfere with QWERTY habits. QWERTY is an arbitrary scheme, which if I recall correctly was only justifiable as it avoided mechanical collisions in typewriters. It is not optimised for quick input, however, and it almost neglects entirely the frequency of keys being pressed. On the other hand, one must consider the issue of universality since not all languages use a given character at similar frequencies. it all boils down to the question: is greater (keyboard) diversity a positive thing?

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 18th, 2006 at 5:12 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.