10 Inventions on Keyboard key layout: A TRIZ based analysis

The standard QWERTY keyboard was developed in the late 1800's for the typewriters. As people were acquainted with that the same layout was retained for the computer keyboards. Many people feel that the QWERTY layout is not very efficient layout and there have been many inventions on different layouts of character keys. In order to improve the key arrangement, two major issues should be addressed. (i) The improved key arrangement should offer significantly improved productivity. (ii) The training time for learning the improved key arrangement should be minimized. This article analyzes 10 inventions from US patent database each of which have proposed a new layout giving us some specific advantage. The inventions try to achieve one or more of the following advantages, viz., to reduce finger movements during typing, to achieve speed in data entry, to reduce errors in typing, making keyboard easy to learn, making easy for children to find keys, reduce stress in hands and finger and suitability for special purpose computers.