See, what I would like to know is, what aspects of keyboard design actually make the keyboard more efficient? Most discussions I've read about QWERTY vs Dvorak,

See, what I would like to know is, what aspects of keyboard design actually make the keyboard more efficient? Most discussions I've read about QWERTY vs Dvorak, etc. eventually turn into personal anecdotes or debates about economic ideology, which has nothing to do with keyboard design. Optimizing keyboard layout to have common letters on the home row and alternating hands during typical usage seems like a reasonable principle. Dvorak is significantly better at that than QWERTY, at least for English text. (Neither was designed with Norwegian or C in mind, obviously.) Years ago, there was a website* in which the author used genetic programming to evolve better keyboard layouts, seeded with QWERTY, Dvorak, and a few others. Dvorak was never best, but tended to place highly. But the more important question is, how should you score keyboard layouts? * My wayback machine bookmark says the author blocked it with robots.txt. Is Dvoark an objectively better keyboard? I don't know. I've typed with Dvorak for about three years, and I strongly prefer it, but it could probably be better. I also don't care about typing speed - I already type fast enough to not mind getting briefly sucked into QWERTY/Dvorak threads before breakfast. ;) I haven't ever used any of the really funky ergonomic keyboard designs (the Kinesis, Maltron, etc.), but that's another option, and possibly more important than layout.