Apple.com and Flickr/foxypar4 If you're like most people, your fingers spend a solid chunk of the day flitting across a keyboard.

Whether that's an enjoyable experience or a miserable one is up to a lot of factors, including your stress levels, hunger, and work load, but also simply whether the keyboard is designed to meet your needs.

Yes, you have keyboard needs and probably didn't even know it.

Industrial designers tend to refer to three different components of a standard keyboard's design.

As Microsoft's senior hardware project manager Rob Bingham recently explained in Popular Mechanics, they're known as the travel, the snap, and the discoverability, and altering just one can totally change a user's experience.

The travel

In this case, "travel" refers to how far the keys move when someone pushes on them.

Modern keyboards, with their increasingly sleek designs, have tiny travels. The keys barely go anywhere. That's a far cry from the typewriters of old, whose keys routinely plunged an inch or more before any ink hit the paper.

One reason typing on an iPad isn't as satisfying as using a desktop computer or a laptop is that an all-glass keyboard offers a lousy tactile experience. Nothing happens. Instead of stringing letters into words, hearing and feeling the click click as it happens, you might as well be tapping on a window.

A good travel is one that lets your fingers enter a kind of flow state, in which you aren't consciously pressing for more time than you'd like to.

The snap

A keyboard's "snap" refers to the amount of force needed to press a key. Some buttons, like those used in TV remotes, have almost no snap. At the first sign of pressure, they submit.

Computer keyboards tend to have a stronger snap — they resist slightly, then fall.

This delay is important for a user experience, Bingham explains, because it helps set a smooth pace for typing. Keys that are too hard to press slow people down, while overly sensitive ones can lead to typos.

The discoverability

The third and perhaps most subtle consideration is how far your fingers have to move to reach different keys — the "discoverability."

For the sake of convenience, keys need to be relatively close by. But whether someone prefers the squished style of a Dell keyboard, whose keys are ever-so-slightly caved in, over a Mac's flat, spaced-out chiclets is simply a matter of taste.

The reason you make so many errors while texting, aside from the fact you're only using your thumbs, is that it's not entirely intuitive how to "discover" the appropriate key.

It's ironic: Back when phones were dumber and not just sheets of glass with force touch, their actual keyboard designs, however bulky, may have been smarter.