On Automated Generation of Keyboard Layout to Reduce Finger-Travel Distance

The QWERTY keyboard layout can be very inefficient for one-finger typing on virtual keyboards since the letters in many common digrams are placed on opposite sides of the keyboard, resulting in a long finger travel. This paper reports on use of simulated annealing for finding alternate arrangements of the letters of the English alphabet on keyboards with different number of rows, to reduce finger-travel distance for entering text. The use of simulated annealing led to arrangements of the letters on 3 × 10, 4 × 7, and 5 × 6 layouts with a lower weighted sum of finger-travel distances for all digrams (denoted by d) compared to the QWERTY layout (lower by about 40%). The layout with the least value of d among those found in this work is a 5 × 6 layout for which the value of d is only 1.78 key widths compared to 3.31 key widths (the value of d for QWERTY). Alternate automated methods to solve this problem, connections between keyboard layouts and facility layouts, and many new applications of the ideas in this work are discussed.