Three Reasons Why you should Learn Touch Typing (From a Designer’s Perspective)
As a designer, I always thought a mouse to be my best friend than a keyboard. I have always underestimated the power of a keyboard. Yes, I use them for shortcuts keys and all, but still, they were all single key press. So I thought studying touch typing was just a waste of my time. But recently, I got a UI design gig and it was a website which teaches us to touch type with the help of AI. The client was a close friend of mine and he sent me a prototype to test before starting the UI design. So I thought why not, let’s give it a try.
The name of the website is www.typingbolt.com (it’s live right now, you may check it out)
So I gave a 2–3 hrs daily for designing that particular website. I started to spend 10 mins on that typing tutor prototype daily. I initially started it to get an idea how users would use it to understand more about how to design the overall UX. But gradually I started to enjoy that typing session. After one week I completed the designing of the website and gave to the client. But what remained was my habit of using that typing course daily. I just use it for 10–20 mins daily.
So I’m writing this blog after using it for probably two weeks. Right now I’m able to type without looking into the keyboard and I have a typing speed around 130 words per minute.I know to real typing standards it nowhere near to an acceptable typing speed. Still, even at this speed my workflow and my productivity have changed to a large extent.
Now you may be wondering how in world a designer could improve his productivity to 50% just by learning touch typing. So here is my list of areas where my typing skills helped me (from the perspective of a designer who doesn’t code that much) to be a better designer.
Inspiration Hunting
We designers all know that phase (I suppose) .. you just get a work and you are so excited to start it …and once you take out your pencil and paper to doodle out your ideas …BAM… Everything is blank, you don’t know where to start or what style to use. Obviously, next place we go to get some inspiration is google (Behance, dribble, or any other place where you get your ideas). Then you start typing keywords in the search tab to filter out what exactly you want…
A major chunk of my workflow nowadays contains google search and for that, you need to type in your keywords. And this is one of the places where typing helped me a great deal…Yeah, I know.. you might think “it’s just a few keywords how much time you need to type that”…But believe me when you start to work on something almost 30% of your whole workflow consists of searching on the internet and even if you could speed up it that by 1% that’s gonna help you a lot
Work Without Looking out of the Screen
This might not seem to be a game changer but listen to me out. Whenever I’m illustrating something or doing any kind of design work I just glue my eyes to the screen. I try maximum never to look out (it might be bad to eyes but it helps me to be in the zone). Whenever I just look out it feels like you came out of the creative loop. And that bugs me.
Before I trained touch typing in typing bolt it used to happen every now and the when I had to type out something. But when you study touch typing the sites strictly instructs you to never look into the keyboard while typing. And I know this particular skill is a bit tough to get into your system. But once you master this skill, it will change the way you work. It will feel like the whole computer is a part of your body. Its just start to do things faster that you have never even thought that you could do that fast
Bullet Speed Chatting and Blogging
It’s obvious that typing doubles your chatting and blogging efficiency. But if you think into it these two things are quite important if you make you are living out of the internet. No one these days calls you on the phone.And no one likes to see that “typing animation“ for more than a few seconds. if you are chatting with one of your clients and if you can’t keep up with them.. believe me, that’s a major NO-NO.
So where can i Start training Touch Typing ?
I might be a little biased in this area but still, my recommendation is
www.typingbolt.com
I have a few reason to choose typing bolt. Typing bolt is the only solution I found that adapts to my tying skills and provide me words accordingly. They claim that it is achieved through some kind of “BOLT AI” (Besides it always good to have an AI tutor…).And another thing I noticed in typing bolt is that whenever I make a mistake on a particular alphabet, the AI identifies it and adapts the whole set of words accordingly next time so that that particular alphabet is repeated in every word (That’s some AI futuristic shit… right?).
Yeah, I have heard keybr.com is also good alternative …But it’s very boring…Even though it has some similar features it’s so boring that after few hours you just stop using it.
