At the end of October visitors of the Dutch Design Week (DDW) got the chance to try out the Typeware device. The DDW is one of the world's largest and most prominent design events, attracting over 300,000 visitors from around the globe. Typeware had a booth in the Klokgebouw, which you can consider to be the main building of the event.
During 9 days, there has been a continuous flow of people to our booth, trying the device. All sorts of people: men/women, tall/small, seniors/children and more/less trained computer users.
We have conducted the tests in single hand mode - this was most practical, and allowed to give the most people a chance to try. This means that people could put the device on, adjust it, try the mouse and type some words like 'pop', 'monk', 'you' or 'monopoly'. A typical session took 5 - 10 minutes.
Often people were a bit intimidated at first, but quickly realized they "can do it" and got quite excited. They understood how to use the full functionality of the keyboard/mouse, and would merely require more training to become faster and to reduce errors.
We enjoyed the fair, we enjoyed all the impressions and appreciated the energy that our visitors put into it. We have had discussions, gotten suggestions. And it has been a tremendous opportunity to try fit many different kinds of hands. We found out that in general the adjustment options worked for 99% of the people between 1.60m and 2m. We did also experience that quite exceptional hand shapes exist, like short thumbs or curly index fingers.