Conclusion / synthesis of the keyboard poll results

[Saber]

Reply to post from Saber in The official news thead.


I don't want to turn that thread into another keyboard discussion, so I'm importing it here. I'll cross-link with a reply there to this post.

Spoiler

No, it has functionality issues to it. I've posted some needed changes here but I'll reiterate them anyways for the readers.

The problem with your layout is not that people haven't heard your rationale, they just don't agree with it. Repeating it over and over again is not going to fix that, it will only annoy people.
You have a couple of points, so I'll address them here.

Junk symbols ° § € at significantly reachable positions while these ] } \ | are pushed away to and past the middle. No need to clone everything from a full-size German PC keyboard.

Junk? That's a selfish thing to say. Depends on usage patterns. I don't care about ° § but I do like the availability of €.

_ - = + are weirdly placed. If you, and it seems so, are imitating strictly U.S. symbol pairups then they shouldn't be arranged reversed like that.

I agree with this one. They are out of order and neither of them is in a harder to reach position so frequency of use does not really play a role here.

Brightness controls for screen and key backlighting, on one button, on the same side as the keyboard modifiers to use them. Please no looping.

Don't worry, looping is easily software controlled. Is brightness changing something you do so frequently that the combination of it should be super easy? For me it is fairly boolean (indoor minimum brightness, outdoor maximum brightness). I think that moving it just makes more important buttons harder to reach.

Is the keyboard Shift going to be a sticky key? It should be since ( and ) are unwieldy to reach without the L1 shoulder.

Software controllable. I would recommend the keyboard shift to be sticky by default.

All these are much more reachable: { } [ ] \ | _ - + =.

One of the aspects that people liked according to the polls was that shifted values were one row above the non shifted values on the Fn layer (i.e. DOSbox "cheat-sheet").
You break this principle with / and ? and you reverse the direction for -_ and =+.

Removed Print Screen on Escape, which shouldn't like Enter have any modifier value.

While I agree with the principle, I rather have them paired then not having a Print screen button.

All brightness controls still reluctantly on one key but now easily accessible with the keyboard Fn. It's no longer clumsy to change brightness, which people tend to like to do sometimes.

I think sacrificing a comfortable shift+usr and Fn+shift+usr is worse than sacrificing a comfortable shift+brightness and shift+fn+brightness (see above).

While this improves things, I've also further pushed in the private layout discussion most of you are unaware of to move all brightness controls to keyboard-only Fn + Dpad, with Fn + Up or Down for display, and Fn + Left or Right for key backlighting.

Spoiler

Fn + dpad combinations is a bad choice because it is very likely to accidentally press that while gaming. You could utilize a keyboard-fn combination only, but that is rather confusing. In general it is not obvious without very ugly labeling around the dpad to easily communicate brightness changes on the DPAD.


Personally, I wouldn't mind the brightness key to be another modifier (e.g. HW modifier). That way the brightness key + dpad would change brightness and perhaps other hardware combinations such as "brightness" + W for WiFi, "brightness" + B for Bluetooth, etc.. Obviously it shouldn't be called brightness then. Previously I suggested these to be on the super layer.

I called those symbols junk in relation to their importance on a scale of what other keys we need there. Euro is useful, and remappable, but the other two, not so much. 

I thought if we are going to do the whole French "thang", we might as well do it all. For myself, I'd remove all of those vowels and use dead diacritics, which is what ED originally intended to do before the poll. 

Print Screen or whatever can be remapped to the User key. Escape is just one of those keys you don't want to annoy. 

How the brightness controls and backlight will be handled on the Pyra now is awful. No way to backtrack with display brightness, which will probably have more than two settings, is like going back in time in interface years. That you can't even use the Shift with it to reverse the display's illumination is just imbecile. People suggested this same thing before and it got shot down to swiss cheese, but now it's suddenly brilliant and new-age.

_ - = + are weirdly placed. If you, and it seems so, are imitating strictly U.S. symbol pairups then they shouldn't be arranged reversed like that.

I agree with this one. They are out of order and neither of them is in a harder to reach position so frequency of use does not really play a role here.

They are out of order for a reason though: it makes + and - closer to one another (on Fn+S and Fn+X).

If you would put them in the "correct" order while respecting the shift-pair convention, you would end up with + and - on Fn+D and Fn+Z, which means the distance between + and - would be larger.

In Saber's proposal, + and - are also close, but his proposal does not respect the shift-pair convention. If you're not going to have a shift-pair convention, then you can just as well put + as a neighbor of - on the same row, e.g. on Fn+A and Fn+S.

Other comments on Saber's proposal:

• ë and ï are overkill, these letters are rare in any language and no standard keyboard has them, so having ¨ on Shift+^ (like on a French keyboard) is good enough
• If you really want to cover French: you're still missing ù and œ
• ñ for Spanish is nice, but according to this source, ñ only has a frequency of 0.311% in Spanish, while ã has a frequency of 0.733% in Portuguese. So I'm not sure if we really need ñ; the Portuguese keyboard has ~ as a dead diacritic and that's it.
• The caron on Shift+^ looks nice and symmetric, but it makes limited sense from the point of view of languages. For example, why have a caron (only used in Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Letvian and Serbo-Croatian), but not an ogonek (used in Polish) ?
• Why F11/F12 to the left of User? Is there any reason not to put F11/F12 as far to the right as possible, to get it as close as possible to its expected position?
• Why are é and è reversed? There is no reason to do that: on a standard AZERTY keyboard the order is é è, and also é is more frequent
• While § is probably indeed not very useful, a lot of people like to have €, and I think ° is quite useful: it's used for all kinds of degrees (temperatures, arcs, coordinates on earth, alcohol content etc), and also (though the symbol is actually slightly different) as an ordinal indicator, e.g. 1°, 2°, 3° as abbreviations for primo, secundo, tertio.
• I don't understand the Shifted Shift symbol
• PrintScreen is nice to have.

I don't care if we have ë and ï but I put them there for completism. Same for ñ, although several members here asked for it. 

You said something different before to ED about degree which was "what do we need it for, temperatures?". Compose +oo creates it and Compose +so or os gives us Section Sign.

You are correct about the order of é è. 

Shifted Shift symbol wasn't meant for the official label. Figured it was understood as Sticky Shift. We don't need the Shift echo on the label of course. 

I want to say that while they appear in strange positions, they will actually be very natural for thumb movement. + and - being in a natural thumb arc from each other, rather than being next to each other horizontally, will be a little bit easier for the thumb to alternate between. It will keep roughly the same "radius" but just adjust the "angle" in °s.


(And they make for some pretty easy code combos in this position, including but not limited to: <= >= += -= /=. You can't beat that with another ordering.)

Some valid points there. That is actually a usability reason instead of just an aesthetic one. Convincing enough for me to deviate from "the standard".

It is surprisingly hard to poke big holes into the layout. I love it Great work everyone.

You can't accept the standard as gospel then reject it when the gloves don't fit. These _ - + = are disoriented and non-standard, and thus break the supreme pattern the authors tried to go for, and use as points against other's layouts which deviate from this rule too for the same reason: the layout doesn't work if we follow conventions.  

It's easy to poke holes in the official layout, if you examine it. The one Shift keyboard key isn't so nice but livable with a sticky Shift. Having ( and ) only available to the shoulder Shift isn't so nice too. The tedious brightness toggles not so either. The tragically wasted positions reserved for those symbols for the smallest occasions, like the three "junk" ones I mentioned, while the coder's tools are put in the middle or closer still to the keyboard Meta which forms them.

These are only some of what I brought up, but, behold the community layout is here now, and I won't "save" you guys from it anymore, so enjoy ED's layout for what actually does work well on it.     

 

[Neelix]

How the brightness controls and backlight will be handled on the Pyra now is awful. No way to backtrack with display brightness, which will probably have more than two settings, is like going back in time in interface years. That you can't even use the Shift with it to reverse the display's illumination is just imbecile. People suggested this same thing before and it got shot down to swiss cheese, but now it's suddenly brilliant and new-age.

Implementation of the brightness key is a software issue. There is no reason why the chosen layout could not set to act as previously described:
 


- Primary layer: Meta layer:
Unshifted: LCD Brightness Up KB Brightness UP
Shifted: LCD Brightness Down KB Brightness Down.

I'm still holding out for no looping too.
 

-Neelix

 

[comradekingu]

Its not self-explanatory is the issue. Using a key on it is the same issue as not using all those 4 keys on it.

 

[Neelix]

It may not be self-explanatory but we have to work with what we've got,  and that's a system that works and is easily explained in the Quick Start Guide.

It's also fairly well hinted at in the key label as presented.   (the up arrow at the bottom indicating the default unshifted action and the down arrow at the top indicating the shifted action, with the word key in the Fn/meta colour to indicate that how to access the keyboard backlight contols.)

While I agree that this isn't terribly clear until you know the scheme, I expect that it's the best we can hope for in such a small area.

(If you have a better suggestion for labelling the key now would be a good time to suggest it)

-Neelix

 

[EvilDragon]

Junk symbols ° § € at significantly reachable positions while these ] } \ | are pushed away to and past the middle. No need to clone everything from a full-size German PC keyboard.

Well, yes, that's why I moved them to a good reachable place in the layout I submitted for the poll (which was layout 11).

The poll showed that it's not that important to the users, and those symbols are not horrible on the current layout either, so I'm going to accept the votes of the community.

We did the same on the Pandora: Move the symbols to easily reachable areas rather than where you'd expect them. And I still think the idea is good, but it also received a lot of criticism from actual users here.

I also moved away () to more usable positions on my layout 11, and that's why a lot of users didn't vote for it.

It's as simple as that.

Different users have different opinions, so I cannot say mine are the ultimate ones. That's why the poll was held: To get a broad opinions and see which ones are most liked.

Which is what we got.

How the brightness controls and backlight will be handled on the Pyra now is awful. No way to backtrack with display brightness, which will probably have more than two settings, is like going back in time in interface years. That you can't even use the Shift with it to reverse the display's illumination is just imbecile. People suggested this same thing before and it got shot down to swiss cheese, but now it's suddenly brilliant and new-age.

Eh? You can change brightness up and down, what is it you're missing?

There clearly is Shift for reverse brightness illumination on the keymat...? 

 

[comradekingu]

Nothing fails as much as paradigms you can only explain through text.

Fn+up and down +pageup +pagedown are things you can explain in images, a cheatsheet.

It still fails, just more elegantly. If you cant do real functionality, dont do half in a visual manner, that just isnt ideal for users or non-users of said functionality.

 

[_wb_]

Nothing fails as much as paradigms you can only explain through text.

Fn+up and down +pageup +pagedown are things you can explain in images, a cheatsheet.

It still fails, just more elegantly. If you cant do real functionality, dont do half in a visual manner, that just isnt ideal for users or non-users of said functionality.

So are you saying that unlabeled, hidden brightness buttons at L_Fn + dpad, which means you need a cheatsheet and you break the equivalence of L_Fn and R_Fn, is "more elegant" than a labeled, dedicated brightness button where the labeling itself works as a cheatsheet?

Well then, I disagree.

 

[_jr_]

I do think that for some functions an unlabeled cheat sheet works nearly as good as a labeled one so that the additional freedom to map other functions outweighs the benefit of the labeling (even without considering the concept of clutter). To me keyboard Fn plus DPad is in this category.


edit: I'm fine with the current layout (I'd like single width space, but overall it really is a good synthesis of user preferences)

 

[comradekingu]

There is no such thing as dedicated brightness button. Its half of a dedicated set of (2) buttons,( or a slider). Which is why its not self-explanatory as a print.

I think having the extra button and doing it the laptop way, outside of in your face, is elegant. The real use for it is adjusting on the fly, it by no means have to be a part of the whole communication.

 

[Tenka]

I personally would not mind if the space key were the same size as the others.  I feel like saying this just because I previously wanted it double wide, then it occurred to me that my reasons for preferring double wide were smaller and more selfish than most of the reasons the others wanted a single wide space, "It's fun and looks nice," verses "it allows more likely uses to be possible."  So now I prefer the symmetrical sized keys, don't wanna be a dick.

 

[FaeMinx]

^ You're awesome!!!

 

[Natsu]

Sorry, steps in for a bit. The wide space is not just for looks. Steps back out.

 

[Saber]

Junk symbols ° § € at significantly reachable positions while these ] } \ | are pushed away to and past the middle. No need to clone everything from a full-size German PC keyboard.

Well, yes, that's why I moved them to a good reachable place in the layout I submitted for the poll (which was layout 11).


The poll showed that it's not that important to the users, and those symbols are not horrible on the current layout either, so I'm going to accept the votes of the community.


We did the same on the Pandora: Move the symbols to easily reachable areas rather than where you'd expect them. And I still think the idea is good, but it also received a lot of criticism from actual users here.


I also moved away () to more usable positions on my layout 11, and that's why a lot of users didn't vote for it.


It's as simple as that.


Different users have different opinions, so I cannot say mine are the ultimate ones. That's why the poll was held: To get a broad opinions and see which ones are most liked.


Which is what we got.

How the brightness controls and backlight will be handled on the Pyra now is awful. No way to backtrack with display brightness, which will probably have more than two settings, is like going back in time in interface years. That you can't even use the Shift with it to reverse the display's illumination is just imbecile. People suggested this same thing before and it got shot down to swiss cheese, but now it's suddenly brilliant and new-age.

Eh? You can change brightness up and down, what is it you're missing?


There clearly is Shift for reverse brightness illumination on the keymat...? 

This response is a bit belated but if we go by the poll results shouldn't the  / and ? be on the N and J buttons as they are in the first and second place winners? I'm not saying they should be but the voters didn't mind their placements if the poll is to be respected completely.

How do you use keyboard Shift to lower brightness if the brightness key is on the same right side as it? Do you set it down on your lap like you had to for F11 on the Pandora? Also, not to be controversial here but turning on keyboard backlighting seems a little graceless: tap keyboard Fn with right thumb then move right thumb up to brightness key and press it(unless you guys changed it already to something easier, for those who may find themselves fumbling in a dark room, like Fn + Pyra).  

I've been away for awhile so please excuse the questions as I haven't kept up with the discussion, so does someone have a link to layout #11 or whatever the latest/last layout is called?   Nevermind I think this is his latest here. 

 

[Saber]

I wasn't going to intrude anymore on the topic but if I had a say in it, I would of thrown out some of these binding conventions like Shift pairs and such and gone with something like this which highlights functionality above all:

Layout 13: http://i.imgur.com/mEGcBLF.png

Spoiler

It's your layout so do whatever you guys wish. 

 

[Saber]

And here is the "b" version of Layout 13 with ( and ) now producible with either the shoulder Shift on L1 or the keyboard Shift. 

13b: http://i.imgur.com/vczwmer.png

Spoiler

 

[Grench]

https://www.youtube.com/embed/j4SRsGn14PI?feature=oembed

 

[_wb_]

Junk symbols ° § € at significantly reachable positions while these ] } \ | are pushed away to and past the middle. No need to clone everything from a full-size German PC keyboard.

Well, yes, that's why I moved them to a good reachable place in the layout I submitted for the poll (which was layout 11).


The poll showed that it's not that important to the users, and those symbols are not horrible on the current layout either, so I'm going to accept the votes of the community.


We did the same on the Pandora: Move the symbols to easily reachable areas rather than where you'd expect them. And I still think the idea is good, but it also received a lot of criticism from actual users here.


I also moved away () to more usable positions on my layout 11, and that's why a lot of users didn't vote for it.


It's as simple as that.


Different users have different opinions, so I cannot say mine are the ultimate ones. That's why the poll was held: To get a broad opinions and see which ones are most liked.


Which is what we got.

How the brightness controls and backlight will be handled on the Pyra now is awful. No way to backtrack with display brightness, which will probably have more than two settings, is like going back in time in interface years. That you can't even use the Shift with it to reverse the display's illumination is just imbecile. People suggested this same thing before and it got shot down to swiss cheese, but now it's suddenly brilliant and new-age.

Eh? You can change brightness up and down, what is it you're missing?


There clearly is Shift for reverse brightness illumination on the keymat...? 

This response is a bit belated but if we go by the poll results shouldn't the  / and ? be on the N and J buttons as they are in the first and second place winners? I'm not saying they should be but the voters didn't mind their placements if the poll is to be respected completely.

How do you use keyboard Shift to lower brightness if the brightness key is on the same right side as it? Do you set it down on your lap like you had to for F11 on the Pandora? Also, not to be controversial here but turning on keyboard backlighting seems a little graceless: tap keyboard Fn with right thumb then move right thumb up to brightness key and press it(unless you guys changed it already to something easier, for those who may find themselves fumbling in a dark room, like Fn + Pyra).  

I've been away for awhile so please excuse the questions as I haven't kept up with the discussion, so does someone have a link to layout #11 or whatever the latest/last layout is called?   Nevermind I think this is his latest here. 

/ and ? on the left makes sense if , . ; : ' " are on the left, since that means all commonly used punctuation symbols (for natural language at least) are in one cluster, easy to input even with the keyboard Fn only.

If you only want to use keyboard Shift (and not the shoulder Shift), then it's a good idea to make keyboard Shift sticky (like keyboard Fn and like the Shift on a smartphone virtual keyboard). Yes, that means that display brightness down (and keyboard brightness up and down) are about as convenient/inconvenient as on the Pandora. IF you refuse to use shoulder modifiers that is.

 

[comradekingu]

Spoiler

So moving stuff that doesn't belong in the lower left, and not on Fn, is ok so long as its consistent based on a group of things you don't use in conjunction with each-other..!?

Braking away from the things you actually do use in sequence with those, still to be found on the right. The correct side in terms of picking something, and where space is moved anyway, with enter being the key only found here on a regular board.

Slippery slope of answering the wrong question to ask.

Sticky shift is still one press more than combo-pressing something, because its always less travel and tying up of available input-punching. Having shift available on shoulders does not make the implementation of keyboardshift irrelevant.

Most people don't use it, nor know about shouldershift. Thats the only part in that argument where the pandora is a good benchmark.

For controlling brightness laptops are superior. Dedicated sliders are best, dedicated buttons secondarily, and then Fn+combos.

Mixing the two worst conventions together in a unfamiliar way where the common laptop way doesnt work, requiring three presses, is worse than anything.

Btw the vote is at:

38 vs 52 for singlespace

27 to 5 for "Functions more like a 2thumb keyboard, looks less like a 10finger desktop keyboard"

And the molds are still not made yet.

If people know what they are voting, they come down on the side of functionality with space. Unless there is magically some other conclusion to be drawn???

And if you stayed with what you know, rather than spurious reasoning, we would have that already.

All im asking is something that is _better for everyone_.

 

[Neelix]

Most people don't use it, nor know about shouldershift. Thats the only part in that argument where the pandora is a good benchmark.

We can learn from that though.   Considering that the shoulder button shift and fn keys are the most convenient way to access several symbols and functions, the most obvious take-away is that we need to inform new users of the device that those buttons fulfill those functions and recommend their use in instructional texts.    

I recommend therefore opening the Quick Start Guide with an introduction to the keyboard and gaming controls, and the keyboard buttons on the gaming controls.  Then, any time an instruction is given for entering a shifted or Fn layer character or control on the right side of the keyboard, (including how to adjust the brightness) recommend use of the shoulder button modifiers.   If such a convention is followed across all official and semi-official documentation the knowledge (and hopefully the practice) will be a lot less obscure.

-Neelix

 

[comradekingu]

Spoiler

I helped writing the quickstart guide for the pandora. Redundant ways to type does not belong there, even if they are more efficient.

Keyboardshift matters, what we can learn from the pandora isnt that communicating unmarked shouldershift fails, its that

even if properly communicated,
some people will not use it.

Spoiler

Like ED, he has said he doesnt use shouldershift, which tells me he knows about it and decides not to use it.

You can never re-learn people anything if what they have is good enough to them.

Spoiler

Between convention of pandorakeyboard and convention of desktopkeyboard, the most important idea is not to put burdens on people who are only used to one thing. That would be the desktopcrowd every time. Who also have efficiency on their side. The only reason to differ from that is to make two-thumbs more efficient and to align with the functional layout matrix.

Y
A B is for example never going to do anything, even if it scores high on official use.
 X

How efficient something is has mostly to do with what you are used to. Changing behaviour has the hurdle of actually doing differently
something it is that you do. Reading about or being exposed to, isn't stronger than that.

Look how hard it is to convince people who think something is better, that something is better, when something as broken as the pandora-layout legacy and hive-mind is the only thing going for it!

Typing with fingers, on buttons you see/know in familiar pattern, is super strong. While stronger, groupthink does not change this.

 

Sorry, steps in for a bit. The wide space is not just for looks. Steps back out.

What sort of insight allowed you to arrive at whatever that is supposed to mean?