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Wanna Type Faster? Meet a Buzzy NewKeyboard

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Maybe Q, K and Ykeys are onlygetting in yourway.

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February 24, 2015BY ZARA STONE

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When Ray McEnaney types, he’s confident it’s the most efficient way possible. But it’s not typing

school that’s given him this feeling. It’s his keyboard. Frustrated with the limitations of the

traditional QWERTY layout, McEnaney spent the last decade designing a new one. Considering

that the universal key arrangement was designed in the typewriter age — patented in 1878 — an

alternative seems due. This one’s inspired by a bee.

McEnaney wasn’t satisfied with other typing options people turn to — the most prominent being

Dvorak, which aims to minimize how far the fingers travel and reduce fatigue. He thought the

learning curve was too great: Users need to seriously commit to becoming proficient. That’s how

we get to the BeeRaider, his oddly shaped keyboard that resembles a bee in flight, with two

“wings” of keys arranged on either side of a radial center. It’s a buzzy concept: The layout is larger,

with the keys you need most at the center (which gives you less fatigue, McEnaney says). Keys that

he considers “more useless” — including Q, K and X — are placed farther away.

He promises that anyone can become a capable BeeRaider typist in 20 minutes. The secret? The

key position and the related mnemonic learning tools, through which you practice typing

phrases like “I hate waste excess” and “Just before dawn starts.” It’s a little weird to type in such a

fashion, but I was surprised at how natural it felt after five minutes, my fingers somehow finding

the letters they needed. Having the alpha characters — the keys used most often — grouped

together really helped memory retention as well.

But Kristy Snyder, a cognition and cognitive neuroscience researcher

at Vanderbilt University isn’t sure that keyboard layout can affect

typing speeds. She’s been experimenting with typists’ memories of

their keyboard, and she found that most can only identify half the

keys they use daily. “We think that it’s an implicit knowledge of where

the fingers go; the motor system learns where the keys are, and that’s

how you learn to type,” she says. She found that using Dvorak and

QWERTY layouts were unconnected to retention, “suggesting that

typists know little about key locations on the keyboard, whether they are exposed to the keyboard

for two hours or 12 years,” she says.

This makes the likelihood of the BeeRaider taking off more plausible; if people have no intrinsic

recollection of keys, they should be open to a new way of working. “Using a new system could be

better than QWERTY,” Snyder says, but having to change key mapping could be difficult.

If you’re up for the challenge, the BeeRaider is available for preorders at $112.49, and you can

choose between the optimized layout or the radial QWERTY design. Mobile users can try

BeeRaider’s Android app ($1.92), though it’s somewhat tricky to use on small screens. All in the

name of being able to tap out “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” at superspeeds.

The keys you need most are at the center and the “more useless” keys areplaced farther away.

The Bee Raider futureset of products.

Ray McEnaney

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Zara Stone AUTHOR

Follow Follow @AlmostZara@AlmostZara

Zara Stone is a D.C.-based journalist and videographer who specializes in reporting on the intersection oftechnology and culture.

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