Little Business Man (LBM)
Creative Chopstick Typing
LBM was thinking constantly how to improve the performance of his team. Certainly the old fashioned typewriter interface of PCs was a limiting factor to get the data into the systems. Surprisingly enough not a lot of people where working in the area of advanced human interfaces. There were some activities e.g. by the Advanced User Interface Group in the area of multimodal and new interface devices. However, nobody really seemed to care about the old fashioned typewriter interface dating back to the year 1868, when Christopher Latham Sholes(1819-1890) invented the modern typewriter. Certainly it’s hard to improve a mechanism which has been around for such a long time.
LBM was having Friday night dinner with his lovely wife at his favourite Japanese restaurant, when suddenly he was struck by a revolutionary idea. A young Japanese lady was eating ramen soup with chopsticks at incredible speed. Why could programmers not use chopsticks instead of their fingers to speed up typing?
Monday morning LBM was setting up a web conference with the Japanese branch of his company to learn more about chopstick technology.He trained his team with the help of his Japanese colleagues to hold the chopsticks correctly and after three weeks of training the team was able to type with chopsticks at approximately 60% average typing speed. Speed was even lower when mouse interactions were required. LBM was deeply depressed when he saw these results – his great idea seemed not to work!. However, with the following breakthrough improvements the team was able to speed up chopstick typing to 130% of average typing speed:
1) Introducing a stick controlled tablet to replace the mouse
2) Using chopsticks in both hands
LBM presented the team training methods and the results at the Symposium for Complex User Interfaces in Tokyo, March 2005. The Japanese audience was very impressed how a foreigner was exploiting Japanese technology and kaizen methods in team work. Once again LBM was very proud of his team.
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