Keyboards touch our everyday lives yet, despite the well-known drawbacks of current layouts used across the globe, the position of characters has largely remained the same. Researchers at Aalto University, as part of an international collaboration, have now used computational methods to place keyboard characters for easier, more comfortable typing. The result is a new keyboard standard created with an advanced algorithm, introduced by France on 2 April 2019.

‘Algorithms, like the ones we have developed for the French keyboard, can help us make better decisions. They can quickly evaluate the problems and benefits of different designs and achieve fair compromises. But they also need the guidance from humans who know about the problem,’ explains Dr Anna Maria Feit, the lead researcher of the project.

With concern voiced by the French government in 2015 on the existing keyboard—and its inability to support the proper use of French—priority was on creating a new standard that allows easy and quick use of required symbols. The algorithm created by the Aalto University-led team automatically arranged the characters in an optimal way.

The new AZERTY standard includes commonly used characters in the French language, such as œ, « », or É, as well as 60 other new characters, which are arranged in groups predicted by the algorithm, making the layout more intuitive to use. Characters like @ and / have been moved to more accessible locations, as have ligatures and accents.

‘When rearranging the symbols on the keyboard, there are conflicting things to consider,’ says Feit, who completed her doctoral studies at Aalto and now works at ETH Zurich.

‘Characters that get used the most should be moved to a position that is easy to reach. But if you move it a long way from where it was originally, people will take a long time to learn it and be less likely to use your new layout. You might also want to keep symbols that look similar and have similar functions together to make them easier to find and use, like the colon and the semi-colon, even though one gets used more than the other,’ she explains.