Just as I was saying in my previous post at some point, the key logging applications have received a rather grey label after the great virus/ anti-virus explosion from the mid 90s. You can say that keyloggers can be considered quite menacing cyber weapons, sure, but I have insisted that this case appears when behind the keylogger there is a bad intended person. It is also normal for a good anti-virus to classify keyloggers as malware because these applications launch system calls in order to catch the keystrokes, but I am sure positive and constructive purposes can be enumerated.

laptop keyboard detail designSo I was pleasantly surprised to find out in what simple and efficient manner the people from Lenovo have redesign their notebooks’ keyboards using the information provided by key monitoring.

The model in question is the new T400s ThinkPad. Any notebook “regular” would notice from the first glance that the Delete and Escape keys are way oversized, at least doubled in size compared to the other utility keys. Let’s see how they came with such a design idea:

Step1. Take the new Lenovo T400s notebook prototype and install a hardware keylogger on it (hardware, because they needed 100% accuracy).

Step2. Let 30 of your employees to work on the new “toy” (and let them know about the monitoring device).

Step3. Collect the data, draw the conclusions and the rest is artwork and production.

using laptop keyboardPretty straight forward, right? The conclusion of this in-house experiment was that the small Esc and Del keys were pressed about 700 times each weak. Compared to the rest of the keys, this is significantly high. So the doubling of the key size was logical and with a real support in the real life.

As the vice president of corporate identity and design at Lenovo, David Hill, points out “Any time you start messing around with the keyboard, people get nervous”. True, so when you come up with notable changes do them right so the users would accustom with them and appreciate them in a short time. Well done by Lenovo for the client approach and the keylogging testing idea.

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