Show your hands honor for the strange power they bring you – Aresluna

Show your hands honor for the strange power they bring you

On designing finger-friendly interactions

A hundred or so years ago, there was a problem. People were simply typing too fast.

I know what you’re thinking: they were typing too fast for the primitive typewriters of that era. But contrary to popular belief, typewriters were never that primitive. You could type really fast on even the first popular typewriter, and the QWERTY layout was actually designed to allow you to do just that.

No, people were typing too fast for what we thought our bodies were capable of. With our understanding of neurons travelling inside our brains, processing of the senses, and physical capabilities of the fingers, typists should have maxed out at just above 40 words per minute.

They routinely did 70 words per minute or more.

It turns out, fingers are time travellers. At any given moment, each one is living in a slightly different time – as one finger is moving down to press a key, another is already travelling to the next one, and your brain is thinking of a few keys in advance, visualizing your hands moving to the right place.

A 1897 photo of a dispatching station for Michigan Central Railroad, with two typewriters visible

None of this requires touch typing. What we eventually called overlapping happens even if you reside at the awkward intersection of “hunt” and “peck.” Overlapping is a small miracle happening in front of your eyes, and it happens pretty much to everyone.

A capability of our hands and brains to treat our fingers relatively independently, and allow them to move at their own pace without waiting for other fingers (on the same hand) to finish.

Also, it’s far from the only miracle. Our hands are amazing, our fingers are amazing, and our brains are amazing, too. Altogether they are capable of feats that not so long ago made absolutely no scientific sense – and sometimes still don’t today.

Artists and performers have known that intuitively for centuries.<br>Today, a lot of creativity and productivity happen onscreen, but our interfaces do not often respect the fingers the same way older instruments did.

I want to tell you more about it, and about your responsibility, as a designer, to make sure they do.

The early lessons in optimism

This is an interactive essay.

You can turn off the sound, keep track of your tasks, or navigate using the menu at the top of the screen.

Your progress will be saved between sessions.

When computers were refrigerator-sized machines hiding in rooms humming with the best of 1960s air conditioning technology, any interaction with them was appropriately cold: the only contact they allowed was remotely, via a terminal.

A terminal was a desk computer with the expensive parts taken out. It had a bad CPU, little memory, and scant logic. Early on, it had no screen either, and used a printer or even a typewriter as its human-facing interface.

An old computer with an onsite console for technicians and operators, and an example of a faraway terminal for actual users. The concepts of a console and a terminal survive today in software form.

Given these limitations, the simplest way to build keyboard operation was this: each keystroke had to travel all the way to the big computer via a slow modem, and only its echo was printed when it came back to you, after The Machine confirmed its arrival.

That roundtrip created a delay. That delay made typing extremely unpleasant:

Typing with a slow echo

Click into the input field and type your full name

Terminal

Latency

Input inhibited

An Input Inhibited light on an old terminal -->

It was sometimes even more unpleasant than what you experience here: an ear-piercing beep or, on top of that, the terminal physically locking the keyboard. (Do you know that feeling when you are walking downstairs and you slam your foot on the ground, because you thought one more step was still coming? Imagine that happening to your fingers, all the time, throughout the day.)

The first solution to this problem was to create a buffer, so you didn’t have to wait to type the next keystroke. The locking or the beeping now happened only when you typed so fast you filled up the entire buffer:

Typing with buffers

Click into the input field and type your full name<br>Explore latency and buffers to see how they feel

Terminal

Latency

Buffers

Buffers in use

Bfr overrun

The delay was still there. But as long as the keys themselves aren’t dirty or sticky, it shouldn’t matter, right? After all, fingers are so good that they don’t need confirmation from your eyes. Fingers are so good that they sometimes press Backspace for you, without you looking, without you even realizing, just because they can sense on their own that the previous key press was misplaced.

But by the 1960s typing evolved from just retyping memos to creative writing, programming, and other less rigid forms of using the...