Button layout idea

[Matrix]

Sometimes I get crazy ideas, and I've decided to share this one. It might seem odd, and I'm not sure if there's any merit to it.

I don't know how to explain this well, as there are two aspects - the psychology behind it, and the keyboard itself. We're all conditioned to want the biggest buttons possible for our software keyboards, but in the process of doing that we're encouraging our brains to be sloppy. And by reducing the whitespace between keys, we're decreasing our room for error. If we have two keys with only 1px of whitespace between, our brains are telling it's okay to press anywhere on that key, but that also means we're only 1px away from the wrong key press. Whether we realize it or not, or brain is concentrating on "pressing anywhere on that button" rather than "pressing on the center of that button" because of the visual nature of the button itself. I know many times I'll knowingly press the corner of a key (as opposed to the center), only to slip a fraction of a mm to the side and end up pressing the wrong key. But I find when I focus on pressing a letter (which is usually at the center of a button), I'm much more accurate than when I'm focusing on the pressing the entire button.

What I propose is the idea of *perceived whitespace* between the keys - smaller visual cues, but while still retaining the biggest hotspots possible anyway. Imagine a keyboard with the tiniest *visual* buttons possible, even though the whitespace around it still would map to that key. That'd make your brain work harder to coordinate your fingers, but also allow for much more leniency when positioning your fingers. I guess what I'm saying is, there's always a certain "fuzziness" around what we're aiming to tap, and what we actually end up tapping - so by having big buttons with no whitespace, as is the case with pretty much all soft keyboards out there, we're enlarging that fuzziness to the point where it overlaps other buttons, thus causing accidental taps and errors.

I know it sounds sorta dumb, but it seems like it could work for some people. It also seems like Apple uses this approach, as their soft keyboards leave plenty of whitespace.

Here's a picture trying to describe what I mean.

[cyril]

Hi
actually that was the rationale behind the "black on white" (and now "white on black") skin: to focus on the letter.
And what you propose is not crazy, it's exactly how the keyboard works for instance if you use the iPhone skin, the white space around the key is taken into account when you type.
Actually it's even more like that, as all the neighbour keys are taken into account by the prediction algorithm when you type (otherwise you would make many more mistakes)