While some consumer notebooks attempt to attract the eye, Lenovo's business-oriented ThinkPads take a more austere, simple approach.

But in all notebooks, there's some serious design decisions made under the radar, that consumers and other customers don't necessarily see. In a blog post, David Hill, Lenovo's vice president of corporate identity and design, explained the evolution of one decision: a revision of the keyboard layout in the new T400s.

Hill and Lenovo installed keyboard loggers (with permission) in a dozen or so keyboards within Lenovo, to gain a better understanding of what users hit what keys, and with what frequency. (Hill notes that one unscientific way to understand this is to simply look at your keyboard at an angle -- the most frequently-used keys will be polished, whereas others, such as the '~', or tilde key, appear rougher.)




Lenovo then constructed a "heat map" of the most frequently used keys, a portion of which appears above..

"In the end we decided to change the keyboard for what believe is the better," Hill wrote. "We increased the size of the delete and escape keys to make them more comfortable to use and mapped the shape to the vertical trajectory of the stroke. Okay we had to move the insert key to make way for a larger delete key, but our data indicated it was far less frequently used. We tested early hardware with real people  and have used prototype machines with the keyboard modifications for over a year. As a side benefit we also think that we improved  accidental striking of the F1 key by moving it to the right. Nice fix to a known reported issue."