Where QWERTY came from
The story that QWERTY was designed to slow typists down is folklore, and the leading scholarship on the layout's origins rejects it. Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka's "On the Prehistory of QWERTY" (ZINBUN No. 42, 2011) traces the arrangement to the working needs of telegraph operators transcribing Morse code rather than to any deliberate braking of the typist. Their argument against the slow-down story is difficult to answer on its own terms: an operator whose keyboard was holding them back could not have kept up with the incoming Morse sender. Smithsonian Magazine's account of the paper is the accessible summary.
The gentler version of the myth — that QWERTY separates common letter pairs so typebars would not jam — is also weaker than its popularity suggests. The same account raises an awkward detail: E and R sit next to each other on QWERTY, even though "er" is one of the most common letter pairs in English. That is not what a jam-avoidance layout would look like.
Two things are worth holding at once. The slow-down claim should not be repeated as fact, and neither should the telegraph explanation, which is one research group's thesis rather than settled consensus. The honest summary is that QWERTY's origins are genuinely contested, that the best-documented account points at telegraphy, and that nobody has produced evidence of deliberate sabotage of the typist.
What the Dvorak layout changes
The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, designed in the 1930s by August Dvorak, who held its patent, rearranges the letters so the home row reads AOEUIDHTNS: all five vowels under the left hand and several of the most frequent consonants under the right. The stated design intent is that common English words can be typed largely from the home row with the hands alternating, so fingers travel less and long runs on a single hand are rarer.
That is a description of the design, not a measurement of its effect. Writing about keyboard layouts conflates the two constantly, and keeping them apart is most of the work of reading this subject honestly: a layout can be elegantly reasoned and still fail to make anybody faster.
What the Dvorak evidence actually shows
The result everyone cites is a wartime US Navy study in which fourteen typists retrained on Dvorak improved by about 75 percent — from roughly 32 to 56 WPM after 83 hours of training — against 28 percent for a QWERTY comparison group. It is not independent evidence. August Dvorak ran the study himself, held the patent on the layout it tested, and had received funding from the Carnegie Commission for the research. Reviewing it decades later, the economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis found that the QWERTY typists' initial scores had been measured differently from the Dvorak typists' initial scores, in a way that disadvantaged the QWERTY results.
The best independent test points the other way. In 1956 Earle Strong ran a controlled study for the US General Services Administration in which ten government typists were retrained on Dvorak. They needed well over 25 days of four-hour training simply to return to the speed they had already reached on QWERTY, and in the second phase of the study the Dvorak group progressed less quickly with further Dvorak training than the QWERTY typists did with further QWERTY training. Strong concluded that the retraining cost could not be recouped, and recommended that the government carry on training typists on QWERTY.
Two smaller data points sit alongside that, both reported in Liebowitz and Margolis's account. One is an IBM assessment that no alternative has shown a realistically significant advantage over QWERTY for general-purpose typing. The other is a 1973 Western Electric study of six typists that found roughly a 2.6 percent improvement after 104 hours of Dvorak training. Six typists is far too small a sample to generalise from; it is quoted only to convey the scale of the honestly measured effects, which is a couple of percent after more than a hundred hours of training.
None of this proves Dvorak is worse than QWERTY. What it means is that roughly ninety years on, the claim that Dvorak is faster still rests principally on a study run by the layout's own patent holder, while the one careful independent test found against retraining.
What Colemak changes
Colemak is a more recent alternative, deliberately designed to be a smaller move from QWERTY than Dvorak is. It changes the position of 17 keys relative to QWERTY, and only two of those move between hands. The default layout has no Caps Lock key: a second Backspace occupies that position instead. Common shortcuts, including Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, keep their familiar places, which is a real practical advantage over Dvorak if you use them constantly. Those details come from Wikipedia's summary of the layout and from the layout's own site.
What does not exist is a controlled study establishing that Colemak makes a fluent QWERTY typist faster. That is not a criticism of the layout so much as a statement about the evidence base, which is thin for every alternative layout, Colemak included. If you see a specific percentage attached to a Colemak speed claim, ask what was measured to produce it — a finger-travel model is not a group of typists.
What finger-travel models measure, and what they do not
The usual quantitative case for an alternative layout comes from a keyboard-effort model such as Carpalx, which scores a layout by simulating how far the fingers travel and how awkward the transitions between keys are across a corpus of text. These models are serious work, and what they measure is distance and modelled effort.
Distance is not speed. A layout that halves finger travel has not thereby been shown to raise anyone's words per minute, because typing speed is limited by things the model does not contain: how automatic a movement has become, how much overlap you can hold between consecutive keystrokes, how often you have to stop and repair something. Converting a travel-distance ratio into a WPM figure is a step with nothing under it, and it is where most "layout X is N percent faster" claims quietly come from.
A finding from the largest published typing study is a useful check here. Across 168,000 volunteers producing 136 million keystrokes, what distinguished the fastest typists was not raw per-key speed but rollover — pressing the next key before releasing the previous one — which accounted for between 40 and 70 percent of their keystrokes (Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, CHI 2018). Rollover is something a typist develops through familiarity with sequences. No layout hands it to you on day one; switching layouts throws away the rollover you already have and asks you to rebuild it.
About that typing record
Barbara Blackburn is routinely cited as living proof that Dvorak is faster, usually in the form "the Guinness World Record holder at 212 WPM". Almost every part of that sentence needs correcting.
Guinness listed Blackburn between 1976 and 1985 at 170 wpm peak and 150 wpm sustained for 50 minutes, not 212. The 212 figure traces to a Seattle Times report from May 1985 describing a brief burst on an Apple keyboard. Her records were accepted into the book without an official test, after a Dvorak advocate lobbied on her behalf. And she does not hold the record now, because that record no longer exists: Guinness dropped electric- and computer-typewriter speed records from its 1987 edition onward, on the stated grounds that results on such machines cannot be compared with any accuracy. The typing records Guinness lists today are alphabet-typing records — the fastest time to type the alphabet is 3.25 seconds, set by Shashank in Karnataka, India, on 25 February 2024. The claimed-versus-listed history is documented on her Wikipedia entry, sourced to contemporaneous newspaper reports.
Even at face value, one exceptionally fast typist would say nothing about a layout. Establishing that a layout is faster requires a controlled comparison, which is precisely what this literature is short of.
Should you switch?
Here is the decision laid out against what the record actually supports.
| Reason to switch | What the evidence supports |
|---|---|
| "I will type faster" | Not supported. No controlled study shows a speed advantage over a fluent QWERTY typist for Dvorak or Colemak, and the one careful independent test of Dvorak found against retraining. |
| "My fingers will travel less" | Supported as modelling. Effort models such as Carpalx do compute shorter travel for the alternatives. They measure distance, not speed and not comfort outcomes. |
| "It will be more comfortable" | Plausible and personal. Comfort is genuinely subjective, no sourced figure exists, and nobody can tell you in advance whether it will hold for you. |
| "It will prevent injury" | Not supported. There is no sourced figure for any layout or keyboard shape preventing repetitive strain injury. |
| "I find it interesting and I want to" | Entirely sufficient. It is your keyboard. |
What you should budget for is the transition. Strong's typists needed weeks of daily training to get back to where they started, and that was supervised full-time retraining. Expect a dip, expect it to last, and expect shared machines, other people's laptops and half-remembered shortcuts to be intermittently annoying for a while. Those costs are certain; the benefits are not.
Keyboardo has no layout setting and does not need one: the test compares the characters you produce against the target text, so it measures whatever layout your operating system is set to. If you are mid-transition, a short timed test taken regularly is a reasonable way to watch the dip recover. The comfort side of the question is covered separately in the typing ergonomics guide.