The Standard and Dvorak Keyboards Revisited: Direct Measures of Speed

The Dvorak keyboard has been claimed to be greatly superior to the standard typewriter keyboard. However, none of the earlier research on the relative merits of the two keyboards provided unconfounded measures, ones permitting attribution of the results solely to the differences between the keyboards. The present research supplied, for the first time, direct measures of speed on the two keyboards by the same persons. Eight experienced standardkeyboard typists, ranging in skill from the median speed of terminal high school trainees to beyond the 97th percentile speed of experienced employees (45-81 words per minute), typed high-frequency digraphs on both keyboards, resulting in a 4.0% superiority for the Dvorak keyboard. The relationship of present digraph findings to performance of realistic tasks is discussed, and research on whether differences in keyboard efficiency vary with the skill level of operators is recommended. Under procedures that produced results entirely attributable to the keyboard designs, free of confounding factors, the Dvorak typewriter keyboard was found to produce speeds of keying 4.0 percent faster than those of the Standard (Qwerty) keyboard. However, employers were reported to be unwilling to bear the costs of the several weeks required to retrain employees on the novel keyboard.