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HERO: Rethinking the Smartphone Keyboard

Why are we still typing with a 19th-Century mechanical layout?

By Rain Noe - April 1, 2015

Industrial designer and UX specialist Corey Stone makes an excellent point: The QWERTY keyboard was designed in 1873 for typewriters, so it is absurd that we have grafted them onto smartphones. And since we're typing with our thumbs now, any time savings gained by the QWERTY layout (meant for ten-finger usage) is completely lost; you probably know that the original QWERTY layout was designed to have letters commonly written together spaced further apart, to avoid the mechanical problem of having metal keys too close to each other causing a jam.

So Stone has done something about it, designing the HERO keyboard. According to his research, nine keys are used 80% of the time, so those go in the center of the innermost circle of his layout and are rendered the largest. And with no mechanical jamming to be concerned about, it makes more sense to have commonly-juxtaposed letters placed close to each other. Here's what it looks like in action:

Enter a caption (optional)

"You can drag across adjacent letters for even faster entry," Stone writes, "and the main view always includes a comma, period, !, ?, #, & and @ for quick access, while the Number view has a convenient keypad layout."

Stone is selling the HERO keyboard as an app for 99 cents.

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HERO: Rethinking the Smartphone Keyboard

Tarun Malik

4 years ago

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Wanted to share a keyboard that I designed for low-vision and blind users.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rethinking-keyboard-inclusive-design-low-vision-blind-tarun-malik

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Alex Balson

4 years ago

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An interesting idea, but charging money for something like this seems a bit silly.

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Adonia Brighid

5 years ago

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I still don't think that this is an advancement in touchscreen typing. I think that the best keyboard used is the 8pen. It uses the strengths of the touchscreen sliding possibility and can be used with one hand. Who didn't have to learn using the QWERTY keyboard. I don't understand why people don't want to learn a new way of typing if that means typing better on the touchscreen.

With this keyboard we haven't moved away from the format of the typewriter. We are still thinking of the keys as being laid out in a flat fashion, as in the typewriter. Where have we innovated. As far as the 8pen is concerned, the flawless motion of sliding the finger on the screen is used to produce words.

I still think that the 8pen is the best innovation of writing on a touchscreen.

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Bill Horan

5 years ago

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An interesting idea and the keyboard problem is quite real. But after playing with it a few times, it's clear that very few people will spend enough time with this to become better at it than they are with QWERTY on mobile.

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Joey Aiello

5 years ago

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Looks a lot like 8pen: http://www.8pen.com/

Tried it in it's early stages, but it was too hard to learn and get good at. Muscle memory is a hard thing to overcome (just try anyone who's tried to learn Dvorak, especially when they can already achieve 100wpm on QWERTY).

Plus, there were a bunch of studies that showed that, despite traveling less distance overall, competent/trained 8pen users still couldn't achieve much more than a few wpm faster than competent/trained QWERTY-touch users.

Swiftkey and Swype are really, really good on Android, especially as it learns your style. With a combination of swiping and hunt/peck (even blind), I've gotten waaaaaay faster over the last 2-3 years. Unfortunately, I've tried Swiftkey on iOS and it's absolute garbage. They're still getting up to feature/accuracy parity (the algorithm is obviously worse, and the customization around double-space behavior, periods, etc. just isn't there yet.) Wait for it to get better, and you Apple fans will love it, I promise. :)

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m powers

5 years ago

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And why didn't they call it the TINA keyboard ;)

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m powers

5 years ago

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This is a third party keyboard I would actually download. Whenever I upgrade..

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jerry patterson

5 years ago

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look cool

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Rain Noe

I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.