Recently I was thinking about how much information gets lost between the moment someone begins typing a comment on a webpage and the moment they click "submit." They may have spent a long time composing it, deleting words and phrases as they go only to replace them with better ones. It sounded like an interesting project to somehow capture this information.

The simplest way I could think to index this activity was to provide a text area that counts keystrokes as well as characters.

While obviously not a perfect indicator, a high keystroke-to-character ratio would indicate that the user has spent a lot of time editing. This could indicate that the user is a bad typist, that the user was being careful with her words, that the user didn't have the ideas clear in his head, that new information came to her as she typed....who knows.

I chose to visualize this high ratio by coloring the background of the text area, although a numeric score or icon could work just as easily. By giving high keystroke-to-character -count ratios a red color, I'm implying a warning: this message has been heavily edited. But this could be reversed. Perhaps the writer sees value in editing and time spent composing.

I have two more variations on this in the works, but for now, here's the first proof of concept.

• last modified: 01/02/2011