The Keyboard Story - Product thinking series

How many of us have we looked at a keyboard and at least once, thought to ourselves, why couldn’t they have a simple and predictable layout. One which all of us could remember without laboring for months before it seeps into our behavioural memory 

Driven by this thought, I did some digging and thus came about, one of my favourite product stories that is both interesting and informative…

In the interest of brevity, I’ll stick to highlights and key milestones of the typewriter and QWERTY keyboard evolution. For the uninitiated, a hint: Google knows everything,

One of the first citations of typewriter innovation dates back to 1714, when a patent was filed in Britain. During 19th Century many innovators around the world started experimenting with various designs of the typewriter, many patents were filed but none of the designs proved production worthy.

In 1865, Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee and his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule invented their first typewriter. This was the beginning of the modern keyboard. In 1873, first contract for commercial production was signed with first shipment done in 1874. The first model known as Sholes and Gilden, looked like a sewing machine, which only wrote capital letters, was the first to introduce QWERTY keyboard (Though the origin of QWERTY layout is now being questioned with recent revelations coming to light (QWERTY evolution) ).

In 1878, the second model of the typewriter was released, which introduced SHIFT key, as we know it today, to support both lower case and upper case characters.

This new model was reliable and efficient but due to not so intuitive placement of the characters, the typists still had a problem adapting. The company then promised training along with the product it sold thus initiating mass adoption.

Summary: It took 164 years of design innovation for the typewriter and the keyboard design, to be accepted widely. During this course a lot of inventors put forward their design which failed for various reasons. There is a legend that in England there were competitions where inventors would bring their designs and participate in typing competition to qualify their products as superior.

The takeaway

Putting on my Product Manager hat, there are quite a few things that, for me, stand out in this story. Things that we can relate to, as Product Managers, especially in the early stages of product planning 

Fail Early & Fail Cheap

It cannot be emphasized enough that as Product Managers, we need to build the product right and get to market in time.

How do we know if the users would like what we are building, more so, will they pay for it or will they prefer our product to our competitors’?

This is where the concept of MVP and Lean Startup comes in handy. As product managers, we need to identify and prioritize those core features that defines our product, in other words, define Minimum Viable Product.

Once we are close to MVP, it should be vetted with the target user group. This helps achieve two things, one, we get to know if we are building the right thing and two, we confirm it one way or the other early in the development cycle.

This approach saves some money and gives the management enough time to change tack without incurring huge losses and to top it, it gives invaluable experience.

Think of Adoption

Always think of the user!! Ease of use, is one of the most important plank on which Products are built and sold. While desired as it might be, we have to accept that there are products for which ‘Ease of use’ might not be the most important thing or cannot be achieved given it’s complex functionalities.

Think of those ERP solutions. The thought of working with them can make a mortal soul sweat. To think of it, the goal of such products are different, they are not meant to engage users or generate a wow experience. It is build for heavy lifting. It is meant for integrating those huge sources of data, fetching millions of records, creating reports etc.

Then how do we make the user use the Product given it is so complex. The learning curve alone can dissuade beginners. To achieve large-scale adoption, the makers then need to build an eco-system around training new users and incentivizing businesses that buy their products by providing training and support.

Typewriter manufacturers did the same thing. Early users were trained. Businesses were promised free training for their staff.

User Behaviour

This perhaps is the most important of all. When I started this article, I had asked that one question. Why do we have QWERTY keyboards that is not so intuitive and requires months of keyboard time before we get used to them.

In the good old days, we had an explanation that the keyboard was designed to have the most often used keys at the farthest distance so that the typewriter didn’t break down or maybe for the MORSE code users. But why do we still use it?

Though I am not totally sure but my guess would be, it is because there was a generation that was trained on typewriters and then same users were expected to move on from typewriters to the computers. Later even when this generation was long gone the new users were used to the QWERTY keyboard and so on so forth. Hence, even though various keyboards or versions of it were tried, it never worked because a new layout was working against the very behavioral memory of all those users who have spent years and years on the QWERTY. For a user when any habit seeps into the behavioral memory, it is almost impossible to shake it off. Well at least until now, it is.