Member-only story
Do Mechanical Keyboards Make You Type Faster?
Results from an experiment conducted at UC Berkeley
Mechanical keyboards look and sound great. Not only that, but they’re a lot more fun to type on as the feedback is more tactile than a normal keyboard. However, mechanical keyboards are expensive, with some of the costliest models ranging from a couple hundred dollars to over a thousand dollars. When investing in a piece of tech like this, are there any benefits to typing speed?
When I first discovered mechanical keyboards, it was back in 2013. I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, and just splurged $120 on a new keyboard.
After making the purchase, I was curious to find an answer for myself. Do mechanical keyboards make you type faster? I felt that I was typing faster by doing a few typing tests, but that was just my own personal experience. I teamed up with a few classmates in the stats department to run an experiment to test whether students would type faster with a mechanical keyboard versus a regular keyboard.
We were able to gather data from 24 students to conclude that mechanical keyboards did improve typing speed, by nearly 10 WPM.