I do agree that digrams/trigrams turn out to be the most important thing in this kind of layout. The MessagEase layout seems to get a lot of digrams right, even if it’s only by accident. I think the real problem is that we don’t have a very good model for the relative costs of things like non-alternating thumbs and sliding from the same box after a tap. I think the optimization algorithm would probably not be that hard relative to quantifying the costs of different placements.
I do agree that digrams/trigrams turn out to be the most important thing in this kind of layout. The MessagEase layout seems to get a lot of digrams right, even if it’s only by accident. I think the real problem is that we don’t have a very good model for the relative costs of things like non-alternating thumbs and sliding from the same box after a tap. I think the optimization algorithm would probably not be that hard relative to quantifying the costs of different placements.