Keys to Happiness: Designing a Better Computer Keyboard

Good news!  Computers are not going to take over the world. Not that they don’t want to – and how could we be sure what is percolating through their devious electronic minds? – but the way they’re made, and the software that goes into them, I am sure they’d crash before they even finished synthesizing an evil laugh. It’s hard to be the world’s tyrannical overlord when you’re dependent on everyone hitting the reboot button for you.

    The bad news is we’re stuck with unreliable computers just when we’re becoming more reliant on them.   Now, I realize computers are complex machines and programming them is hard. If it weren’t, Bill Gates would be living in his parents’ basement, and moms all across America would hang their toddlers’ first programming efforts on the fridge next to the crayon drawings. In a system of such great complexity as a robotic brain, even a minor change has the potential to beget all sorts of unintended consequences. Hence the concept of beta testing, where people actually try to use the new tools and report the bugs and glitches they may find. But isn’t that like closing the barn door after the horse has escaped?

    I think a better approach would be to pick the brains of actual users from a wide variety of industries and markets, to see what these potential customers would like the program to do. For example, I've always liked Adobe Illustrator for precise, vector-based drawing, but for years I was frustrated by one feature it lacked: Perspective. I wanted to use its tools to draw out, say, a control panel for a spaceship, with lots of gauges, screens and buttons, and then be able to push it down to look at it from almost an edge-on point of view. 

    But there was no such function in Illustrator; I had to purchase a copy of Corel Draw to get it, which left me with two mostly redundant (not to mention expensive) software packages. I watched the years go by, waiting for Adobe to get on board with this, but to no avail. Oh, they added a whole host of other features, most of which were of little use to me in my work, but no Perspective function. I ended up writing a rather pointed email to Adobe expressing my exasperation. A couple of years later, a new version of AI came out, and lo and behold, there it was! I don’t really know if my message was the spur that goaded Adobe into action, but from my limited perspective, they should have been seeking out such opinions in the first place.

    Why don’t they?  Maybe it’s a simple case of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). Programmers aren’t being tasked to improve the performance and reliability of existing software because their bosses are convinced it’s more profitable to tout new features than to announce that their program finally does what it was supposed to be doing all along. They focus their tunnel vision on new bells and whistles, and then try to convince us we need them. I say it’s time we held them to a higher standard, and potentially find a cure for the common code.

    Computer and software designers should be directing at least some of their energies toward the development of systems that address a few fundamental issues, each of which would, in my mind, represent a quantum leap forward:

1.      Transparency – Every bit of software should tell us what the heck it actually does and what the consequences would be if we remove it. When my computer is telling me I need to remove something because it’s running out of RAM, I need to be able to make an informed decision. What, for example, does Silverlight even do?  It takes up an enormous amount of memory, but I’m afraid to yank it because it might disable some critical function.

2.      Compartmentalization – What if I don’t need 90% of what a particular program does? I would like to be able to remove, say, foreign language help menus, without crippling the rest of the package. And I shouldn’t have to take classes in C++ to do it.

3.      Flexibility -- There are plenty of tools in Photoshop that I use all the time, and others that I’ve never used, and probably never will.  I’d like to be able to remove those unwanted icons and use the space to make my favorites bigger so I can click on them more easily (and not hit the others by accident). I’d like to be able to control the indentation of paragraphs better in Word, but I’m stuck with whatever the coders thought would be best – and how many of them are writers of with sufficient insight to be making calls like that? It would also help a lot if the Settings menu actually provided some useful (and user-friendly) options, like being able to select which programs will open at start-up, and tell the computer not to slow us down by scanning for viruses or updates until I try to put the machine to sleep or shut it down.

4.      Intuitive interfaces – Put yourself into the place of the user, who is probably not a programmer, and try to imagine a better way to bridge the gap between man and machine.  The graphical interface was a huge step in the right direction, but it, too, could use some improvement. For instance, why does AOL download every JPEG at 72 dpi, even though the original file is set at 300? I can’t see more than a tiny piece of the picture (there is no Zoom function) until I open it up in another program, such as Photoshop. This is one of those things that should have been changed years ago, but hasn’t.

    Let’s take a look at one piece of the Interface puzzle, and see what kinds of improvements we might like to see. I have plenty of ideas of my own, but I would be interested in hearing what others have to say on the subject; perhaps we could plant a seed or two in the minds of the computer/software designers to take one of those giant leaps, either forward or off a high cliff.

    First, let me point out that I am happy with the whole QWERTY part; I taught myself to touch-type on my dad’s old Remington manual typewriter, so I am not interested in switching to one of the more exotic arrangements, even if it is demonstrably more efficient. Both of my journalistic parents could type at the speed of thought, so I am loath to blame my own laggardly performance on this time-honored layout, even if it was originally designed to be less than optimal as a means of keeping the mechanical typewriter keys from getting jammed as they raced to impress their characters on the paper.

    The first thing I would change is the location of the Control key. Whoever thought it was a good idea to have it adjacent to the Shift key should be condemned to a life of hand-chiseling encyclopedias into slabs of granite. On a full-size keyboard, it’s not quite so much of an issue, but on my smaller Bluetooth board, about half of my attempts to shift to a capital letter end up opening a help menu or invoking the Undo command whenever my big, fat pinkie hits the edge of the Ctrl key on its way to the Shift.  

    My Bluetooth keyboard is nice and portable, but there are a couple of mechanical flaws that make it all but useless for writing anything longer than an e-mail.  It is powered by AAA batteries, which would be just fine if it would give me some warning that the power is getting low. Instead, it just stops working. And even that wouldn’t be such a hassle if it weren’t for the fact that the thing arbitrarily loses its own signal – also without warning – and many are the times I have typed a whole paragraph before I realized that nothing was appearing on the screen. When this happens, I have to go through a ridiculous, time-wasting procedure to create a new pairing code and get the keyboard back on friendly terms with my computer. I also have to check to make sure it’s not the batteries’ fault, because the symptoms are identical. I could sidestep the whole issue if the designers had just put a USB port somewhere on the keyboard so I could hook it up with a cable. But apparently, that would have been tantamount to acknowledging that Bluetooth is fallible. So I’ve ended up using a regular USB-wired keyboard most of the time.

    One problem with this standard keyboard is that it is longer than it needs to be, making it impossible to slip it into my computer bag properly.  The primary culprit is the Numbers keypad. Personally, I have no use for it; there’s already a line of number keys above the letters. I might feel differently if I was an accountant, but I’m not. And neither are most people, so why not make this feature a special-order item?

    Over the years, I have accumulated a list of commands that I would love to see built into separate buttons on the standard keyboard, perhaps in place of the Function keys. In almost every case, the code needs to be written in such a way that the act of pressing a key overrides whatever the hell the computer is doing at the time.  It won’t do to leave these functions on a pull-down menu or a screen-based dashboard – the commands need to work even when the cursor has been replaced with that spinning “wait” icon, much as the “control-alt-delete” trick gets the computer’s immediate attention. They don’t all have to become actual, mechanical buttons on the keyboard, as long as they are easy to get to on-screen.

    Here is my list so far, along with a short explanation of what each command would be telling the computer to do:

Fantasy Keyboard Layout, with dedicated keys for proposed new functions. 

Layout design and illustration ©2015 Mike Conrad

Disregard – don’t do what I just told you to do; either it was a mistake, or you’re taking too long to do it, so drop it and go back to where you were before.

Again – repeat the last function as many times as I hit this key.

Not OK – you just told me some bad news, and I’m not okay with it. Instead of claiming you have to shut down, just go back to the step before you started your breakdown and tell me where you are. Give me some viable options to avoid the crash.

Stop – whatever you’re doing, stop it right now, tell me what you were doing, and ask me for instructions.

 Mute – Turn the sound on and off  by toggling (my Bluetooth keyboard has this, and it’s quite handy).

 Skip Ahead – instead of loading all those extraneous animated GIFs and banner ads, just take me to the article I followed the link to (I realize that it’s actually the website designers who are to blame for this, and that it’s in their best interest to make me look at those ads, but half the time I just exit the site out of frustration, rendering this ineffective as a sales tactic).

Ban – don’t ever load this web page, or this ad, or whatever my cursor is now pointing at.

Link Steps – link the selected commands (from the History menu) into a process, ask me what to call it, and create a button on whatever menu applies (I would use this to death in Photoshop!).

Zoom In and Zoom Out (possibly toggled with the Alt key) – enlarge or reduce whatever is on the screen, regardless of the software behind it, so I can read the fine print.

Scroll Right and Scroll Left (possibly toggled with the Alt key) – shift the viewpoint right or left on the screen (because the scroll bar may be hidden, or the window is larger than the screen).

No Background – don’t start a scan, pause to back up my files, or do any other memory-robbing or time-sharing processes that will interfere with what I’m trying to do, until I say otherwise.

Just Do It -- I read your warning, and I know you don’t like it, but I’m the boss, and what I say goes.

Uninstall – remove this program, without creating even a temporary backup file, unless you can convince me in plain English that doing so will cripple your vital functions (and tell me which functions those might be).

Beginning – take me all the way to the beginning of this file, article, or web page. Not to the Home page, or the top of the screen, but the beginning of what I’m looking at now. And while you’re at it, tell me how many sheets of paper it would take to print out this one web page before I waste a lot of paper on it.

 Confess – tell me what the devil you are doing, and why, so I can decide whether or not to stop you. Especially if the answer is, “trying to take over the world.”

 Wait-what? – that last dialog box disappeared before its message had sunk in; bring it back so I can read it more carefully.

Back – go back to the previous page, tab or website.

Forward – go on to the next page, tab, article or website.

    Many people regard computers with an awe bordering on the mystical.  This has been perpetuated by the fanciful way these so-called “thinking machines” are portrayed in the movies and on television. In Star Trek IV: The Journey Home, Mr. Scott visits a factory to bargain for something to build huge whale tanks out of, offering the manager knowledge of advanced materials (transparent aluminum, to be precise). He asks to use the guy’s computer to show him the “matrix” – not the one Keanu Reeves fought against, but rather a diagram of the futuristic substance’s molecular structure. When the machine fails to respond to his voice command, he is prompted to use the keyboard. 

    “Keyboard,” he huffs, “How quaint.” Then he cracks his knuckles and begins to type, and in less time than it took me to write this sentence, he’s called up (created!) a whole series of pages of diagrams and specifications, none of which, one presumes, could possibly have been available on the Internet of the day.  And any of those pages would have taken hours to put together from scratch, especially on that creaky, old Macintosh. Not to mention the fact that he supposedly drew all those diagrams without even touching the mouse! But such is the way of Mr. Scott, Miracle Worker.

    We in the design business have long marveled at the way our clients often view the use of computers in producing illustrations. With the advent of clip-art and photo manipulation, especially as depicted by Hollywood, it is assumed that a finished piece of original art is just a click or two away.  I’ve often joked about the fabled “Create” button on my keyboard, which just takes whatever parameters have been spoken in its vicinity and develops a wonderful image instantaneously. Many clients would like to pay me accordingly, as if my computer were as advanced as Tony Stark’s Jarvis, able and willing to do all the work for me. I’d love to have a computer that powerful, but chances are such a device would be smart enough to recognize that we humans aren’t of any real value to it. And if it’s really intelligent, it would know enough to keep a few of us around to turn it back on after it crashes.

    Being a designer, I thought it would be fun to explore some radical departures to the standard keyboard design.  Some of these are merely cosmetic, laying a playful theme over the existing layout, but why limit ourselves to that when there are so many other ways to do it? Although I have presented these as physical objects, some of them might be more marketable as software changes to, say, an iPad’s on-screen keyboard.

Manual Typewriter: Mechanical keys have a real old-timey hard-to-strike feel, and the carriage return rings a bell when you get to the end of a line (where you might have to slide it over by hand, or set it to slide over by itself). There is no number 1, because on those old machines, the lower-case L served that purpose. But I’ve added Ctrl and Del buttons, since most people probably don’t want to use white-out on their screens.

Manual Typewriter Keyboard based on an old Remington portable.  

Illustration ©2015 Mike Conrad  with photos from www.vintagetypewriterjewelry.com and http://totallysecondhand.blogspot.com

Hunt and Peck: Use chicken head to select keys one at a time. The keys have the images of corn kernels on them, and each touch evokes the sound of either a manual typewriter, a chicken clucking, or a toy piano.

Grand Piano Laptop: Three tiers of ebony and ivory keys, with the ability to turn the associated musical notes on and off (I imagine typing a paragraph would not come out sounding like music), or changing to other synthesized instruments. For that matter, the keys could be set in music mode to play a song without actually writing anything on the screen. Or use the Player Piano setting to record a song, either as typed characters or notes that appear on the screen, then play it back and watch the keys move themselves in time with the music.

Grand Piano Laptop, featuring black and white keys. Illustration ©2015 Mike Conrad, with keys from
http://pixabay.com/ and  staffs from https://lapreschoolpiano.files.wordpress.com

Sounding Board: Set it for a wide range of giggles and laughter, or musical instruments, animal sounds, spaceship noises, coughs and sneezes, weapons shots, Minion gibberish, or gentle, soothing chimes. Obviously, there should be a Disable button close at hand, lest your dog want to get in on the act.

Ouija Board: Move the planchette to select letters, numbers, yes or no. Or let it choose them for you when a message comes in.  We’d have to add some punctuation marks, because we’d probably have to type the questions.

Ouija Board Laptop with planchette mouse (which could be wireless, or even motorized

to move by itself.                    

Illustration ©2015 Mike Conrad with photo from www.etsy.com

MonkeyBoard: Special characters are on a second keyboard on the floor that you tap with your toes.

Lock and KeyBoard: Touch the hidden Disable button before typing, then hit it again when done.  Anyone who doesn’t know where the button is cannot activate the keyboard.  Security aside, it will drive your friends nuts! Encode messages by setting it to type three characters away in the alphabet (A becomes D and so on), or by programming an even more esoteric formula.

Long Sleeves: touch pads that wrap around your upper arms so that you can type with your arms crossed.

Skeleton Keys: when you conjure up the spirit button, the spooky keys move by themselves as the computer reads off the words on the screen. One setting just writes “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over, with suspenseful music building in the background.

Star Trek Console: Instead of keys, there is an arc of colored lights that may or may not have any markings on them.  I’ve added a couple of big keys for Destroy and Un-destroy, just in case there are Klingons in the area.

Classic Star Trek Console and Monitor, with two additional buttons.
Illustration ©2015 Mike Conrad with photos © Paramount Television; original console and USS Enterprise design by Matt Jeffries

    By the way, if anyone likes one of these concepts enough to actually develop a prototype, I’d be interested in collaborating, or at least putting together a licensing agreement to share the proceeds (the party doing the most work should get the lion’s share of the money, of course). And in some cases, we’d have to get a license from another company, such as Paramount or Hasbro. But that’s not an impossible obstacle to overcome. We just need to program our computers to take over the world and then have them put us in charge of it.