A key press, rebuilt

You never notice a good key press. You notice a bad one: the letter that came out wrong, the key that answered late, the word that fell apart when two thumbs overlapped. So we treated the fraction of a second between a touch and a letter as an engineering problem, and started by measuring it.

We began by measuring

How a keyboard handles a touch is not written in any manual. So we read what has been published about the leading keyboards and measured the iPhone’s own, frame by frame: touches, slides, two thumbs at once, keys held down. Then we measured Armath the same way, changed it, and measured it again.

Soft

A good key gives way the moment you touch it, and commits only when you do. That is most of what softness is on glass: nothing to wait for, and nothing decided too early. A finger that lands a little off is not punished for it.

The key answers at once. It commits only when you do.

Exact

We recorded real typing and went through the wrong keys one at a time. Some causes were large, and some were too small to see. We removed what we found, and replayed the recordings to confirm that the right keys stayed right. The keys at the edges of the screen now answer like all the others.

A tap stays a tap

On a keyboard that also swipes, every quick tap risks being read as a stroke. Armath tells them apart, so a small slip does not turn into a stray word, fast typing with two thumbs stays clean, and leaving the number pad types nothing.

Light on your phone

All of this has to run in the small space iOS gives a keyboard. We went through the work Armath asks of the phone and cut it without changing anything you see, and switching to Armath from another keyboard became noticeably faster. Vibration has ten steps, so the feel in your hand is yours to choose.

What comes next

A measurement can say when something happens. It cannot say how a key feels. That is judged by hands, and sessions with native Armenian typists are our next step.