Autocorrect Aware Keyboard Layout

Take a look at your keyboard layout for a second. Notice how all those vowels are clumped together? Ever try typing the word “big” on a cell phone and get “bug”, or “bog”, or even “not”? Frustrating, innit?

Keyboard layouts—and QWERTY in particular—weren't designed with the concept of autocorrect in mind. This can lead to all sorts of off-by-one typos, particularly as more and more of our typing is done with our thumbs on a 4-inch screen. And while autocorrect is pretty good at catching many of these errors, if the word you're mistyping happens to be a valid English word, quite often the system won't autocorrect it for you.

However, autocorrect has made its way back to the desktop, so it seems time to design a keyboard layout that takes it into account. The primary criterion for designing such a layout is that adjacent keys should be highly unlikely to ever be typed in lieu of each other. The vowels should be moved as far apart from each other as possible, and each vowel should be buffered with the least frequently used letters. In between those buffer letters come the more regularly used consonants.

Travel time and distance would be increased compared to standard layouts, but on a cell phone that doesn't really matter much. And on a system with autocorrect, error rates would decline dramatically. All you have to do is hit a key in the general vicinity of the key you intended to type and the system will figure out what you meant.