My name is Nathanial Fair, and I am an industrial design student at the University of Alberta in Canada. I got into keyboards this summer, and now I am doing a design project in the area of mechanical keyboards. To help my work, I have written up a quick survey that should only take around 2 minutes to complete. It is completely anonymous and intended for student use. For general interest I will post the results once data has been collected. I have also posted this to Geekhack, r/mk, and Deskthority as to get an overview of the enthusiast community.
I am also looking for one or two people to interview over the phone. I am hoping to interview someone who owns a lot of boards and keysets to better understand the wants and needs of people at the high-investment end of the keyboard hobby. If you would like, I can keep you completely anonymous, and just as with my survey this is intended for student use. Please feel free to comment or pm me if you would be interested in being interviewed.
Interesting survey! I filled it out as best I could. I personally store all of my keycaps in bags. I take them out of the trays they arrive in and put them in gallon zip-lock bags. I find any kind of storage tray frustrating to deal with and generally regard it as something that slows down the process of swapping out caps. I own several ePBT keycap holders, 4 JKT trays, and 20 or so GMK trays. I’ve thrown the rest out. Baggies are perfect for me b/c you can see what’s in them, you can get the caps out easily. Also, unlike hard containers they aren’t set to a certain dimension that may take up too much room (or not be large enough).
Granted, I may not be your average user. I probably own well over 100 keycap sets. Just my two cents.
I also have trays / boxes and the same as you I end up placing everything in zip lock baggies.
I use IKEA transparent plastic boxes to stack one on another, and put the ziplocks with keycaps there. I have 1 box for switches & parts, and 3 for keycaps. I also keep the trays/boxes for most of the stuff, but empty to pass the stuff further in the original packaging.
P.S: I might contact you at some point if you are interested in keysets trades, as I sometimes get them, look at them without mounting and place them in storage. Some keysets don’t make it to the boards (even GMK) , so I am willing to trade those towards others that look more color appealing to me.
