A User's Experience: Why the Kinesis Advantage 360 Keyboard Was Not the Right Fit

Keyboard choice is highly personal. What suits one individual may not suit another, as personal anatomy and established habits significantly influence the ideal keyboard. This review offers a perspective on the Kinesis Advantage 360 keyboard, aiming to provide insights that may help others make informed decisions about its suitability.

My third and final Microsoft Sculpt keyboard.

Why the Kinesis Advantage 360 was Chosen

The author's previous keyboard, the Microsoft Sculpt, was discontinued, necessitating a replacement. The primary motivation was to acquire the most ergonomic keyboard available as a preventive measure against existing hand pain, likely exacerbated by mouse usage, and to mitigate potential future issues from keyboard use.

The Kinesis Advantage 360 garnered excellent online reviews and was widely praised for its ergonomic features, including a fully split layout, thumb clusters, key wells, and orthogonal keys. Its popularity among professionals further solidified its appeal. However, despite its promising reputation, the keyboard ultimately proved unsuitable for the author's needs.

The Kinesis Advantage 360 keyboard.

Challenges with the Kinesis Advantage 360

Adapting to the Kinesis Advantage 360 presented significant difficulties. Despite extensive typing practice over the first month, while general English typing improved, proficiency in typing and navigating code never fully developed. After experimenting with several layout adjustments, the keyboard was ultimately abandoned after two months.

Forced Customization

The Kinesis Advantage 360 is designed for extensive customization, offering robust software for key remapping, multiple custom layers, and macros. However, this flexibility became a burden. The author found it necessary to remap several keys to align with existing muscle memory but struggled to determine optimal key placements. Hours were spent researching alternative layouts and making educated guesses, considering all frequently used keyboard shortcuts. Each layout change was a significant investment, requiring weeks to develop new muscle memory, making "getting it right the first time" a high-pressure endeavor. This process of keyboard layout design was neither enjoyable nor desired; the author preferred to be a user, not a designer.

The customized layout, highlighting remapped keys in green.

Key Shape and Home Row Feedback

A notable issue was the considerable height of the Kinesis keys compared to laptop or previous external keyboards. This proved problematic, particularly for the pinky fingers. Pressing keys with a pinky felt awkward, but the primary frustration stemmed from aiming and consistently failing to locate the correct key with sufficient accuracy.

An example illustrating the reach required by a shorter pinky finger on the tall Kinesis Advantage keys.

Further annoyance arose from the lack of pronounced tactile bumps on the home row keys (F & J). While the home row supposedly features a unique shape and potentially a subtle texture difference, this was insufficient for confident hand placement. Frequently, hands would be misaligned horizontally, with the index finger resting over 'K' instead of 'J'.

Impact on Productivity with Standard Keyboards

Using the Kinesis Advantage 360 significantly impaired the author's ability to type efficiently on standard laptop keyboards. The orthogonal layout of the Kinesis made typing on the staggered rows of a laptop keyboard challenging, often resulting in mis-hits by half a key.

Moreover, the Kinesis's unique thumb clusters established a completely different muscle memory for essential keys like Backspace and modifier keys (Option, Command, Control in new positions). This forced a mental pause before attempting any keyboard shortcut on a conventional layout. The arrow keys further compounded these issues.

Impaired Code Navigation

The arrow key placement was the most significant frustration. On the default layout, Left and Right arrows were assigned to the left hand on the second bottom row, while Up and Down arrows were on the right hand. This configuration proved highly impractical for precise text selection, which frequently involves holding Shift, Option, or Command keys while navigating with any of the four arrows to select multiple lines of code, often not starting from the beginning of a line. The default layout made such actions extremely awkward.

The default arrow key placement on the Kinesis Advantage 360.

An alternative layout was attempted, relocating all four arrows to the right hand's second bottom row in the order: Left, Up, Down, Right. This also proved ineffective. The author struggled to adapt, as the brain consistently expected the Up arrow to be positioned above the others. While eventual adaptation might have been possible, the frequent need to switch back to a laptop keyboard interfered with muscle memory development.

An attempted custom layout with all arrow keys under one hand.

Recreating the classic arrow layout (Left, Down, Right on one row, Up above Down) would have required using a second layer, which the author wished to avoid. Constantly toggling layers for arrow key access, or holding an additional modifier key that conflicted with existing multi-modifier text selection shortcuts, was deemed impractical. While custom keyboard shortcuts or macros for text selection could have been explored, the author's aversion to the customization process precluded such extensive efforts.

Increased Mouse Usage

The cumulative effect of these challenges—difficulty finding the right layout, problematic arrow keys, and unconventional thumb clusters—led to a predictable outcome: a significant increase in mouse usage. The author's established keyboard shortcuts no longer felt intuitive, and the new movements required for the same shortcuts felt unnatural. It seemed as though the new keyboard was not optimally designed for the author's typical macOS and WebStorm shortcuts. The perceived ease of using the mouse "just this once" for actions previously performed exclusively via keyboard shortcuts became a frequent occurrence, despite the self-assurance of future keyboard fluency. The decision to abandon the keyboard was solidified upon realizing the author had reverted to using the mouse for basic text selection and copying—a practice not engaged in for decades.

The Alternative: Kinesis mWave

Despite the unfavorable experience with the Advantage 360, the author concluded that Kinesis is a reputable keyboard manufacturer, appreciating the high quality of the hardware and impressive customization options. This led to a decision to try another Kinesis product: the Kinesis mWave, marketed as a Microsoft Sculpt clone.

This new keyboard proved to be an excellent fit, offering several improvements over the Microsoft Sculpt:

• Seamless switching between wired and wireless connections.
• Backlighting functionality when wired.
• Custom layouts are saved directly onto the keyboard, allowing for consistent use across multiple computers without remapping.
• The Up arrow key features a tactile bump for easier identification.

The new Kinesis mWave keyboard.