Why is my typing slow?
Where the time actually goes, and what keyoke needs to see before it says so.
A speed score is an average, and an average hides where the time went. Most of it is spent between keys: the gap from one keypress to the next. Some of those gaps are short and some are long, and the long ones tend to come from the same few movements, over and over. Find those and you know what to practise. Practise everything and you mostly practise what you can already do.
Take a 30-second test and the results will point at the first of them. The rest of this page explains how.
The movement between two keys
Every pair of letters asks your hands for one of three movements, and they do not cost the same:
- letter pairs that swap hands, like th or en. One hand moves while the other is still finishing, so these are usually the fastest.
- letter pairs typed with one hand, like as or io. Two fingers of one hand, one after the other.
- letter pairs that use the same finger twice, like ed or un. One finger has to lift, travel and press again, and nothing can overlap. For most people these are the slowest.
keyoke times each keypress from the one before it, sorts the gap into one of these three, and takes the median of each, so a pause to read the next word does not count as a slow movement. When one movement is clearly slower than the others, that is the first thing the results tell you.
Why not just list your slowest letter pairs?
Because one test cannot support it. A 30-second run at 80 wpm is about 170 keypresses spread over more than a hundred different letter pairs, so almost every pair is seen once or twice. Ranking those would mostly rank luck. Grouped into the three movements, the same keypresses give each group twenty or more observations from a single test. Individual pairs appear in track as they build up over many runs.
One hand behind the other
The same comparison runs between your hands. If every key your left hand types arrives later than the right hand's, that shows up as an imbalance rather than as a list of slow letters, and practising left-hand words fixes more than practising any single key.
Mistakes, and what fixing them costs
A mistake costs the wrong key, the backspace and the right key, plus the hesitation that follows. keyoke counts corrections per 100 characters and calls your reliance on them low up to 3, moderate up to 8, and high above that. It also measures how much slower you type straight after a mistake, which is often where the time really goes: not in the mistake, but in the few keys after it.
How sure it has to be
Every one of these numbers is noisy over a short run, and a typing test that reports noise as a weakness sends you to practise something that was never wrong. So nothing is stated until it clears two bars.
- Enough observations. A figure from fewer than 5 is not shown at all, and it needs 20 before it can be the reason given for your speed. Until then the page says how many more tests it needs.
- A difference bigger than chance. The limits were measured by simulating hundreds of typists with no weakness at all and seeing how large a difference shows up anyway. In a single test, one movement has to be 55% slower than another, and one hand 30% slower than the other, before either is called a weakness.
That is a high bar on purpose, and it is why one test only catches the obvious. Keep typing and the bar drops: across your history the same claims need only 10% between movements and 8% between hands. A plateau is usually made of differences that small, which no single test can see.
What this cannot tell you
- Whether your keyboard is lagging. If keys appear late on every site, or double letters go missing, that is your keyboard or computer, not your typing, and no test can separate the two.
- Anything about a layout other than QWERTY. Hands and fingers are assigned by standard QWERTY touch typing. On Colemak, Dvorak or any other layout, the speed and accuracy are right and the hand and finger analysis is not.
- Languages other than English. The word list is English, so the letter pairs it measures are English ones.
The exact rules for every number are on the about page, along with what this browser keeps. Nothing you type leaves it unless you sign in.