Now, before you read on about what it is I do exactly, let me just make it clear that it isn’t M+J Modified, it’s in fact MJ Modified. The plus (+) in the logo isn’t really a plus at all… in fact its the stem’s shape in Cherry MX style switches and key-caps.

I know a picture is worth 1,000 words (and I love pictures), so just allow me to demonstrate:

Motivation

Now that we got that out of the way, let me tell you a little about what drove me to carry out this project. As I write this about page, as important as wearables with voice recognition and pointing devices are, a massive amount of our interaction with our computers still involves a keyboard. Be it for content creation or gaming we tend to use a keyboard of some sort the majority of the time. Unfortunately for many of us though, due to a never-ending focus on cutting costs or in some cases engineering limitations due to the lack of space, that experience of using a keyboard is generally poor.

This is what drove me to return to the hardware of my youth where the user experience was at the forefront of design. Yes, you guessed it, I’m talking about the keyboard with mechanical switches. But not just mass-produced keyboards coming in from China, instead I’ll talking about taking about keyboards – some in fact based on large-scale mass-produced models coming from China – and modifying these to enhance the user experience.

User Experience above all

With my custom boards, my intention is to place user experience above all else and to ensure anyone can afford the experience.

You’re probably wondering what I mean by user experience. Well, let me try to clear that up a little. Naturally, whenever we press a key we expect a certain result. It’s pretty much taken for granted that the keys we press will result in a certain action being carried out on our computers. That’s not what I’m talking about though. Its quite simple really, I’m talking about a positive emotional response to having pressed that key.

Most of us won’t really give it much thought, but the feeling of the shape and texture of a key under your fingers generates an emotional response. The way that key moves under finger and sounds as you press it generates an emotional response. The sound made by the key-press, simply looking at the keyboard’s physical presentation (key-caps and LED illumination) or even moving a keyboard’s results in emotional responses. The sum of these different parts of the experience, along with environmental factors, determines how you feel about using your keyboard.

My intention is, while offering the best value-for-money possible, to address each of the triggers to the emotional responses of using my custom keyboards, in order to put a smile on the user’s face each time they think of their board, let alone when they use it. I want to maximize the smile factor!

Process

The process is simple albeit time-consuming. It involves either starting with a mass-produced keyboard or assembling a new keyboard and:

  • Adjusting its sound signature through modifications to its case, stabilizers and switches;
  • Adding any weight if appropriate;
  • Changing it’s tactile experience according to it’s desired use – mostly typing, typing/gaming or mostly gaming;
  • Updating it physical presentation.

In the end the result is a personalized keyboard that will make you smile on each key-press.

If you’d like to go through some examples, you can find these in the Builds section.