Has anyone done a properly controlled study of driver speed between QWERTY and Dvorak keyboard layouts? I wonder if people really achieve significant speed improvements, but I have not read anything that is not anecdotal. Typical conversation:
Dvorak: “I crossed two years ago and never looked back, my colleagues hate me! I think that now I can type faster.”
QWERTY: "My colleague switched over two years ago, I sometimes have to use his computer, and I get really annoyed when I have to switch it back to QWERTY. I am still gaining speed faster than him."
Dvorak: "QWERTY was designed to slow the typist down to prevent congestion in obsolete typewriters! We don't use typewriters, so why does our keyboard layout match them?"
QWERTY: "The keyboard layout is a well-developed convention, very similar to the use of English units in the USA. Of course, a transition is possible, but is it possible to recover the cost of retraining in a realistic time? Frame?"
... and from there comes a meaningless dialectic in which QWERTY and Dvorak neglect any valid estimates of such minor empirical data as one who can achieve better typing speed or has a lower RSI risk.
What I would like to see — test results per minute, for example, those that force the driver to repeat random pieces of literature — are shared among users who rate themselves as light, moderate, or heavy typists with information about when it was completed QWERTY-Dvorak transition to try to understand the magnitude of QWERTY's historical advantage. Ideally, the study may include preliminary QWERTY speeds for comparison with Dvorak speeds and, possibly, measurements of Dvorak speed over various time periods after the transition.
I do not need to say this, but just in case: it should be obvious that the questionnaire on the topic with the same ardent fanaticism as the QWERTY discussion against Dvorak cannot control the bias of the choice. The study should perform actual controlled trials and ideally longitudinally.
Does anyone know of such studies?