How Fast Do Your Individual Fingers Type?

Some big updates were made to my Typing Speed Test. I’ve spent the last two weeks brainstorming and implementing ideas I thought would make it more useful. Once I found I could easily capture the speed at which the keys were typed I realized that this also meant I could deduce how fast each finger was moving.

However, to be able to accommodate Dvorak and Colemak users, I had to make the user’s keyboard layout one of the configuration items. I also realized that not everyone types according to the standard fingering positions, including myself. I noticed this back when I was learning the Dvorak layout. My right pinky kept getting really sore. When I switched back to the QWERTY layout, I noticed that the only keys I used my Right Pinky for were the “Enter” key and the “Right Shift” key. To accommodate the people who deviate from the norm, I also made it so users could manually set which fingers they used for each key.

Allowing users to change the normal Finger-to-Key mapping lead to some hard user interface decisions. What I ended up creating was a keyboard map where the user changed a key’s mapping by clicking it one or more times. When it’s clicked, its mapping goes to the next finger in the legend. I initially had a design that used radio buttons, but I didn’t like all of the back and forth movement it caused with the mouse. I’m still not sure I have the best design, but for now I think what I have works fine. Below you can see an picture of the user interface. The keys are set with the finger positions I typically use.

My Custom Keyboard Finger Positions

My custom keyboard finger positions.

Once you finish the test you’ll now be presented with stats on how well you typed and stats on how fast your individual fingers were. To make the test more blog friendly, I also decided to present the user with the HTML code for the output tables. Below you can see two of my tables from a run I did.

Typing Stats
Words Per Minute (WPM): 76
Characters Per Minute (CPM): 378
Words Correct: 32
Words Incorrect: 0
Fastest Finger: Left Pinky
Slowest Finger: Left Ring
Keyboard Layout: QWERTY
Test Duration: 30 Seconds
Stats From PAT or JK’s Typing Speed Test

Average Finger Response Time
Left Pinky: 119 milliseconds
Left Ring: 228 milliseconds
Left Middle: 158 milliseconds
Left Index: 206 milliseconds
Right Index: 135 milliseconds
Right Middle: 128 milliseconds
Right Ring: 188 milliseconds
Right Pinky: N/A
Thumb(s): 100 milliseconds
Stats From PAT or JK’s Typing Speed Test

I should note that the finger speeds are based on all of the key presses you make and not just on the ones that lead to correct words. Also, FireFox seemed to be able to detect Backspace key presses while IE did not.

I still have a bunch more ideas that I want to add in, but I haven’t gotten to them yet (like the hot spot visualization I mentioned in my last post).

If you find any errors or bugs let me know. You can post them in the comment section of this post.

2 thoughts on “How Fast Do Your Individual Fingers Type?”

  1. Hi patorjk,

    This is a neat little test. I never would’ve even imagined seeing how fast another finger compared to another. Thanks for providing this.

    Sincerely,
    Huy

  2. You’re welcome :). Later this week I’m going update it again and add in some more stats, this time on how quickly the different keys on the keyboard were typed.

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