Piano Keyboard#
Piano Keyboard is an Android keyboard app that I released on Google Play around 2011. It has since been removed from Google Play for maintenance reasons.
This app started as a direct follow-up to my experience with No Look Keyboard. No Look Keyboard was an interesting idea, but in practice it was simply too difficult to use. So this time I wanted to build a keyboard with a lower learning curve—something you could try and immediately feel was fun. That’s how I ended up designing and building a keyboard concept based on piano keys.
Concept: typing that feels like playing a piano#
The core idea was straightforward. I mapped each piano key to an input key, and made it so that when you typed, characters were entered while also giving you the feeling of playing notes on a piano.
To add more “fun,” I stored sheet music (a sequence of notes) for various songs and made it work like this:
- When you start typing, the app randomly selects a song from the stored set.
- As you continue typing, the notes from that song are played in order, one by one.
In other words, typing a message was designed to feel like a small performance.
Custom keyboards#
Just like No Look Keyboard, Piano Keyboard supported custom keyboards.
- Mix the characters you want from English / Korean / symbols into a single keyboard set
- Add missing characters
- Add frequently used words
At the time, I didn’t see a keyboard as a fixed input tool—I saw it as something you could reconfigure around your own usage patterns, and I wanted to reflect that idea in the product.
Demo video#
Here’s a demo video of Piano Keyboard:
Feedback after release: fun, but inconvenient#
After releasing it, I shared it with friends and collected feedback. The common reaction was: it’s fun, but still less convenient than a traditional keyboard. Because the concept was strong, the gap from the familiar typing experience was large—and unless someone had a strong enough reason to cross that gap, it was hard for the keyboard to stick as a daily input tool.
Interestingly, I personally used Piano Keyboard, and after an adjustment period, it actually became more comfortable and familiar to me than other standard keyboards. In other words, it wasn’t that the usability was simply “bad”—rather, the concept was so different that the UI and interaction model created a high hurdle, and many people found it difficult to get past that initial barrier.
What I missed: design quality#
Looking back, the poor design quality was also a clear problem. This wasn’t an app that offered a strong functional advantage; it was an app meant to sell an aesthetic appeal—the charm of piano melodies while typing. For that kind of product, design quality needs to carry the experience, and I underestimated that.
Why I took it down: maintenance costs & reality#
As Android kept evolving, maintenance issues came up and the app required updates. Eventually, I decided it wasn’t reasonable to keep investing personal resources into it, and I removed it from Google Play for practical maintenance reasons.