I am home again this morning after two and half weeks of traveling to five countries and what I would call eight cities (one Dutch, one German, one French, four Swiss and one American). It’s good to be home and back on my sofa this morning typing away on my iPad, which is one of my favorite plantar to be…smiling across at Kim (busy doing her games and reading) and Buddy frolicking at my feat shaking whatever toy is within his reach. For his part, Buddy is thrilled that things are back to normal. For me, I’m pondering why typing on my iPad feels a little foreign. The reason is that I barely used it during this whole time away, which strikes me as strange. It has casted me to wonder about my relationship with my technology, since my output and connectedness is not so changed. It’s made me come up with a title for this story of techno-ergonomics…which I thought I made up, but Claude tells me I didn’t.
Techno-ergonomics is a subfield of ergonomics (human factors) focused specifically on how people interact with technology and technical systems. Rather than ergonomics in the broader sense, which also covers physical workspaces, furniture, tools, and manual tasks, this is about how we use and relate to our tech devices. The key elements of it start with the human-technology interface. It’s about designing devices, software, and systems so they fit human cognitive and physical capabilities, rather than forcing people to adapt to the technology. This is about cognitive load or how much mental effort a system demands in terms of interface complexity, information density, decision-making burden. But there’s also the big issue of physical interaction or, specifically, how input devices (keyboards, touchscreens, controllers), posture, repetitive strain, and how our bodies interface with machines over time. Designers will say that efficiency and error reduction are they objeectives such that systems are designed to reduce mistakes and speed up task completion since poor techno-ergonomic design causes frustration, fatigue, and errors. As technology evolves (AI interfaces, wearables, VR/AR), techno-ergonomics tracks how human factors and use patterns and principles need to evolve with it. Techno-ergonomics tends to keep a stronger emphasis on the physiological and cognitive science underpinning good design, rather than just usability testing or interface aesthetics.
What we all know is that the smartphone has taken over the realm of human technological interaction. I won’t bother repeating the evolution that got us to the smartphone as we now know it, but it’s safe to say that there have been aspects of that evolution that have made things like flip phones come and go and phone size to vascillate from smaller to larger and back and forth several times as the use case for these phones has migrated with the underlying capabilities of the phones. I am always tempted to say that we have reached the pinnacle of the process, but I now know better since I’ve been wrong about that too many times. What I also know is that repeated attempts to find other interfaces like voice recognition, alternatives to QWERTY finger mechanisms and even VR goggles of all sorts, have only met with relatively limited adoption. Some of that is form factor like the bulkiness of VR goggles or the unnaturalness of Googles Glasses and some of it has more to do with how are minds are prepared to function (dictation versus typing or simply how our fingers best function).
The QWERTY keyboard layout was introduced in 1873, developed by Christopher Latham Sholes (along with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule) for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, which was manufactured by E. Remington and Sons starting in 1874. The layout arrangement is often said to have been designed to reduce mechanical jamming in early typewriters by separating commonly paired letters, though historians debate the exact reasoning. Some argue it was more about optimizing for telegraph operators transcribing Morse code. Either way, QWERTY stuck and became the standard, even after the mechanical jamming problem became irrelevant with electric typewriters and computers. Actually, QWERTY isn’t particularly well-optimized for human hands or typing efficiency and that’s a common misconception. It “works” mainly because of path dependency, not ergonomic design. It overloads the left hand with a disproportionate share of common English letters (roughly 56% of keystrokes fall to the left hand in a standard layout). Many frequently-used letter pairs require awkward finger stretches or same-finger repetition (e.g., reaching from the home row for common letters like “e,” “i,” “o”). The most-used fingers (index fingers) do more work than the ideally efficient distribution would suggest, and the pinky fingers, the weakest, handle keys like “q,” “a,” “z,” and “p”, which seems inconsistent. So why does it persists anyway? Once millions of people learned QWERTY and manufacturers standardized on it, switching costs became enormous. Retraining typists, retooling keyboards, and reprinting manuals all cost more than any efficiency gained. It had “Good enough” performance to keep it going. Studies comparing QWERTY to supposedly more efficient layouts like Dvorak (designed in the 1930s specifically to reduce finger travel and balance hand usage) show only modest speed differences in practice (often within a few percentage points) once someone is fully trained on either layout. Human motor learning is remarkably adaptable. With enough practice, people become fast and accurate on almost any consistent layout, which somewhat masks the underlying inefficiency. So it’s less that QWERTY is secretly well-suited to human hands, and more that human adaptability plus the cost of switching an entire installed base of typists and machines locked it in as the de facto standard, a classic case of a technology standard winning on momentum rather than optimality.
Meanwhile, voice recognition on smartphones evolved through several distinct phases. Voice recognition research dates to the 1950s–60s, but it stayed largely in labs and specialized enterprise/dictation software (like Dragon NaturallySpeaking, 1997) for decades. Early mobile phones had basic voice dialing (recognizing a handful of pre-trained commands like a contact’s name) starting in the late 1990s, but this was primitive pattern-matching, not true speech recognition. The iPhone’s 2007 launch didn’t include voice recognition initially. Google released Voice Search for iPhone in 2008 and was one of the first mainstream uses of cloud-based speech recognition, offloading processing to Google’s servers rather than doing it on-device (which was too limited in power). This cloud approach was a turning point since it let phones tap into far larger datasets and computing power than on-device processing allowed. Siri launched as a standalone app in Feb 2010, then Apple acquired it and built it into the iPhone 4S. This was the first mass-market conversational voice assistant, combining speech recognition with natural language understanding and task execution. Amazon’s Alexa (2014) extended similar capabilities. Full voice recognition maturation has happened between 2015 and the present.
I have gone from desktop computing to laptop computing like the rest of the world while adding in the iPad tablet and shedding PDAs and brick phones as well as flip phones, leaving me with a standard configuration of an iPad Pro and an iPhone (17 Pro Max…the larger form factor iPhone). Where Kim uses her iPhone for everything and has done so for quite a while, reverting to her laptop for heavy lifting like bigger emails and simple spreadsheets, I much more evenly split my use of iPad and iPhone. The iPad is how I write and do spreadsheets and PowerPoints and much of my e-commerce. But I’ve been forced to use the phone for dictating stories more and more and have adapted and become efficient enough with that to prefer it for convenience on planes and while I travel. This trip was the real test case. Other than one of two Zoom calls, which I did on my iPad, I pretty much used only my iPhone for everything. I still need the iPad for Excel and PPT, but both general story writing and e-commerce are now done mostly by phone.
God knows where it goes from here. I’ve completely ignored the new Apple folding iPhone (the apple iPhone Fold). The supposed advantages are a bigger screen when you need it, multitasking, the “barely-there crease”, the thin profile and the general view that its two devices in one (pocket-friendly as a phone, tablet-like for reading, video, and productivity when unfolded). It’s expensive ($1,999–$2,499), so while I’m tempted to see if this is my next-gen device, I’m prepared to wait and simply enjoy my current state of improved techno-ergonomics with my existing iPhone and less-used iPad.