Keyboard A vs Keyboard B: The Impact of Identity Change and Location Change in the QWERTY Keyboard on Typing Performance

Abstract

Typing, also known as typewriting, has become an essential skill in everyday life for work, school, and communication purposes more so with the COVID-19 pandemic moving all activities virtually. Current research on typing focuses on how the skill itself is acquired and how it is executed but it has yet to fully explore the impact on the QWERTY keyboard cognitive mapping, the keyboard layout that many are most familiar with, when individuals are exposed to different (temporary) keyboard mappings, specifically its impact on typing performance when using the QWERTY mapping after learning a different keyboard mapping. Therefore, this experiment aims to explore the extent to which temporary changes to the mapping of specific keys in a QWERTY keyboard impact the original mapping by measuring performance speed and error rates. It was hypothesized that temporary changes, whether identity changes or location changes, would lead to an instant deterioration of the primary (QWERTY) cognitive mapping, albeit temporarily. However, the results of this study do not support the hypothesis which shows that identity changes negatively impacted performance, but location changes did not.

Key words: typing, typewriting, cognitive mapping, mapping, performance speed, error rates, identity changes, location changes, QWERTY keyboard