Designer Frank Costa uses his iPhone 6 Plus for lots of things, but he noticed that when typing on it one-handed, the anatomy of his thumb use wasn’t as ergonomic as it could be.
Costa decided to design a new kind of keyboard for the thumbs, one that would only need you to tap and then move your thumb a short distance away from wherever you tapped. This would require less stretch and — perhaps — less stress on the thumb joints.
“So, being a designer,” Costa writes on Medium, “I played with the idea of a keyboard thought (out) for the thumb. A keyboard requiring only a single tap and some short swiping to construct words and sentences.”
Photo: Frank Costa
The idea is that you only need to place your thumb down once, and then swipe only as far as your thumb naturally does so, avoiding the stretches associated with one-thumb use of the typical iPhone keyboard.
Costa realizes that this concept won’t solve all the problems with the current way of doing things, and that it’s super hard to get people to do things differently.
“The keyboard is a complex and multi faceted challenge and as thoughtfully designed as some of the new solutions in the market might be,” he writes, “the hardest challenge remains: the transition from the legacy model we‘re so used to into a new one.”
He believes that voice will probably be the way we solve issues with keyboards, but still has fun designing alternative input methods in the meantime.
Be sure to head over to his post on Medium to get the full story on how — and why — Costa designed this cool concept.
Source: Medium
