Researchers have created a new keyboard layout which they claim makes "thumb-typing" faster on touchscreen devices such as tablets and large smartphones.

Dr Per Ola Kristensson, from St Andrews University, said traditional Qwerty keyboards had trapped users in "suboptimal text entry interfaces".

The new design has been dubbed KALQ, after the order of keys on one line.

来自英国、德国及美国的研究人员共同研发了一款适合双手拇指同时打字的虚拟键盘应用，能够将平板及智能手机用户的打字速度从现在的每分钟20个字提高到每分钟37个字，而且打字体验更加舒适自如。

Its creators used "computational optimisation techniques" to identify which gave the best performance.

Researchers at St Andrews, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany and Montana Tech in the US joined together to create the virtual keyboard, which will be available as a free app for Android-based devices.

According to the research team "two-thumb typing is ergonomically very different" from typing on physical Qwerty keyboards, which were developed for typewriters in the late 19th Century.

They claim normal users using a Qwerty keyboard on a touchscreen device were limited to typing at a rate of about 20 words per minute.

来自英国、德国及美国的研究人员共同研发了一款适合双手拇指同时打字的虚拟键盘应用，能够将平板及智能手机用户的打字速度从现在的每分钟20个字提高到每分钟37个字，而且打字体验更加舒适自如。

This is much slower than the rate for normal physical keyboards on computers.

Researchers said the key to optimising a keyboard for two thumbs was to minimise long typing sequences that only involved a single thumb.

It was also important to place frequently used letter keys centrally close to each other.

Finding the optimal layout involved minimising the moving time of the thumbs and enabling typing on alternating sides of the tablet.

The results were said to be surprising with all the vowels placed in the area assigned to the right thumb, whereas the left thumb is given more keys.

With the help of an error correction algorithm trained users were able to reach 37 words per minute, researchers said.

参与研发的圣安德鲁斯大学一位博士表示，传统Qwerty键盘将用户局限在“不够理想的文字输入界面”。新键盘的研发人员利用计算优化技术设置字母的排序，比如，使用频率较高的字母集中在键盘中区，以期让用户在打字时减少拇指移动的时间，从而提高打字速度。我们现在使用的标准键盘是以主键盘字母区左上角6个字母的连写Qwerty来命名的，此次新研发的键盘则以主键盘右下角的四个字母连写命名为KALQ。

Dr Kristensson, lecturer in human computer interaction in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, said: "We believe KALQ provides a large enough performance improvement to incentivise users to switch and benefit from faster and more comfortable typing."

The developers will present their work at the CHI 2013 conference (the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) in Paris on 1 May.

研发人员将于今年5月1日在巴黎召开的美国计算机协会会议上展示该应用，之后该应用将免费供安卓用户下载使用。