Yesterday I finished the Prototyper hardware and wrote software to collect information on timing between keypresses. The firmware I wrote accepts commands over serial that specify a first key and a second key. Then it sends back the number of milliseconds between when the first key is pressed and when the second is. A Processing sketch running on a PC prompts the human being tested to press specified randomly chosen key sequences. It records the data collected from the hardware to a CSV file.

Data

After finishing the firmware and PC software and working out a couple of bugs I did a test run on myself. I recorded about 1000 key sequences (~2000 key-presses). Then I wrote a Python program to generate the matrix graph below, where average timing for every key sequence is normalized and color coded. The left-hand vertical axis is the "from" key, and the horizontal axis is the "to" key. The numbering starts with 0 at my right hand pinky and goes to 9 at my left hand pinky.

Observations

The data is noisy and I suspect that there is not yet enough of it to draw strong conclusions. But some preliminary observations can be made:

• The yellow spattering in the upper right seems to indicate that it generally takes me longer to go from my right hand to my left hand.
• My left pointer finger is pretty fast overall, which is strange because I am right handed.
• My right pointer finger is slow if the next key is on the left hand, but generally fast otherwise.
• Pinkies are the overall fastest. I think this has to do with the weird way I learned to type on QWERTY keyboards.

Improvements

Having data is exciting, but I need to make sure it really tells me what I need to know before relying on it. There are a couple of problems I need to resolve before I use Prototyper to collect much more data:

• While collecting those thousand samples I noticed that it took me a lot longer to get ready for certain key sequences. Because I was only recording the time between the first press and the second, that setup time was lost. For the future I will collect that time on the PC side and record it.
• The data gathering PC application indicates key sequences with colors. Green is the first button to press and red is the second. Often I would simply make the mistake of messing up the order of presses. This reflects a poorly designed GUI, not problematic sequences, so I'm going to replace colors with an arrow that pulses in the right direction.
• Just taking the mean of times for a key sequence when analyzing the data is probably a bad idea because a single outlier can mess up the whole set for a key sequence. I don't know much about statistics, but friends of mine do, so I'll get their help in future analysis.
• I should be recording when completely incorrect keys are pressed, because that is also indicative of a problematic sequence.