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.