Nice in theory, but...

Every so often someone comes out with The Next Big Thing. And they market the theory behind it, people say 'hey, that makes sense', and people start buying the product.

But what if the theory is flawed or incomplete? What do you do with an invention that doesn't really work, because the idea wasn't properly thought through? Often it takes something going out of style before people look back at a flawed product and ask 'what were we thinking?'

Ergonomic keyboards

A good example is a computing product that came out of the 90s. The ergonomic Microsoft Natural keyboard, which splits the keyboard layout into left and right sections that are angled and tilted to point in the direction of your elbows. The idea was based on the fact that your forearms form an inverted V when you type. By putting a kink in the middle of the keyboard, you wouldn't need to kink your wrists in order to have your hands positioned over the keys with your fingers pointing directly forward.

The obvious problem: nobody actually types with their hands positioned that way. Human fingers are different lengths; your little finger is significantly shorter than your index finger, and there's an approximate graduation in lengths between them. That means that when you position your fingers in the home position to type on an ordinary keyboard, your hands form an inverted V too. Using a Microsoft Natural keyboard actually forces you to either kink your wrists the other way, or spread your elbows out further than you normally would.

There's a keyboard on the market that's been in continuous production since the 1980s. It's known the Model M, and is now sold as the Unicomp Classic. It has the same straight layout as any cheap keyboard, yet enjoys a bit of a following among writers and programmers as a comfortable keyboard to type on. The difference is in the internal mechanism of the keys.

Now a typical keyboard registers keystrokes on a 'membrane' under the keys. The membrane consists of two layers of plastic, with screen-painted electrical traces running across them, that are kept slightly separated from each other by an intermediate layer which has holes where the keys are. When you press a key, you flatten a silicone dome which pushes the two membrane layers into contact with each other and completes the circuit in that spot. When you release the key, the silicone dome springs back into shape, and the key pops up.

A Model M also uses a membrane arrangement, but rather than having a rubber dome, it has a spring and hammer mechanism under each key. When a key gets two thirds of the way down, the spring buckles, causing its base to pivot and causing a hammer to strike the membrane, at this point, you hear a loud click and the resistance beneath your finger disappears. From here, your finger muscles (which are actually located further up your arm) instinctively relax as the key hits the bottom, so you avoid straining your tendons.

Old > new ?

How can a thirty year old keyboard design possibly be better than something you get with a new computer today? Well, the Model M was designed by IBM in the heat of the computer wars of the 80s. IBM invested a lot of resources into developing it, and it wasn't a cheap keyboard to manufacture. The reason was because Apple computers were all sold with rubber-dome keyboards. Selling a computer with a higher quality keyboard that didn't feel cheap to type on gave IBM a competitive advantage in the world of business computing, at a time when a lot of personal computers on the market must have seemed (to serious business people) like toys.

So the question: 'what were we thinking?' goes both ways. Sub-optimal design often falls out of favour over time, but a lot of good design gets forgotten too. Design priorities change, and the original vision gets neglected. It's important for designers in today's world to not only create new visions of the future, but also to look back at understanding and appreciating what the vision used to be. Today's computing devices have evolved out of (and bear remnants of) a history of changing design visions, so understanding them is certainly worthwhile.