Keyboard Layouts

- Good mechanical design and a clever placement of the letters that slowed down the users enough that key jamming was infrequent.
- Put frequently used letter pairs far apart, thereby increasing finger travel distances

Dvorak layout (1920)
- Reduces finger travel distances by at least one order of magnitude
- Acceptance has been slow despite the dedicated efforts of some devotees
- It takes about 1 week of regular typing to make the switch, but most users have been unwilling to invest the effort
ABCDE style
26 letters of the alphabet laid out in alphabetical order nontypists will find it easier to locate the keys
Additional keyboard issues
IBM PC keyboard was widely criticized because of the placement of a few keys
- backslash key where most typists expect SHIFT key
- placement of several special characters near the ENTER key
- Number pad layout
- wrist and hand placement