Lebanon is a small underdeveloped country. Its people often need to adapt the trends and technologies that come from more developed countries. And that it manifested in everything the Lebanese use, from the social media platforms on their phones –Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter- to the hardware that comes with their devices.

Everything comes from abroad and the technologies and user journeys are not tailor made to the Lebanese, their culture and their needs. In this case, we’re talking about keyboards. When keyboards were first designed, they took into account English speaking people. It took a while before an Arabic keyboard was created. In the mean time, the Lebanese had to adapt to the qwerty keyboard, and since their language has a few letters that don’t exist in Latin, they recreated their different letters out of numbers. Writing Arabic with a mix of Latin numbers and letters is called Latin Arabic. Today, it is the most used chat language in Lebanon on social media channels and in texting. But it doesn’t come without compromise. The numbers that they use in almost every word they write are on the second page of the English keyboard.

So each time the Lebanese want to write a word, they have to go back and forth on the pages of the English mobile keyboard to fetch their numbers. They lose 2 seconds per number fetched. That’s 1 min lost every 30 words. If they are heavy chatters, that number can go up to almost 30 minutes lost everyday, just to fetch numbers to express themselves and chat in their language.

Touch, Lebanon’s leading mobile operator, promises a new world of innovation. Touch took it upon itself to provide the Lebanese with a solution.

Touch created leb keys, a mobile app that carries a 3rd party keyboard. A Latin Arabic mobile Keyboard. The Keyboard was created by identifying the letters that the Lebanese don’t use when chatting in Latin Arabic (Q,P,X,V) and replacing them with the numbers they do use (3,2,7,5).

The skeleton and coding of the keyboard app was easy, it was taken from existing keyboards. The challenge was to identify the letters, and replace them by numbers, in a way that the design of the keyboard is immediately easy to use without too much hassle. And so, after studying the structure of the Latin Arabic language, we placed the 3 instead of the Q, as most letters that follow the 3 in Latin Arabic are the E and the A. We then decided to place the 3 and the 2 at opposing thumbs. Since they are the numbers that are the most used. The 7 was then placed instead of the C because it is used in Latin Arabic almost as often as the C is used in English. The 5 which is the least used, replaced the X. As a result, It takes a Lebanese person an average of 20 seconds (10 words) to get used to the Latin Arabic keyboard and then the chatting flows naturally.

The timing was perfect. iOS8 had launched and it allowed for the first time, third party keyboards. So, the app was placed on google play and the app store. Once downloaded, users install the Latin Arabic keyboard and it becomes part of their phone’s preset keyboard menu, ready to use for anything they want to write on social media and chat.

That’s how touch turned a complicated chat into a seamless one. Leb keys also saves the Lebanese a lot of wasted time. Millions of hours lost fetching numbers. And it gives them a sense of up-to-date-ness. They as Lebanese, have a keyboard they can call their own, on which they can express their every emotion and opinion in the language they like to chat in vs. adapting to others. Touch also made the keyboard available to all Lebanese, touch users or not. Reinforcing its leadership in the market and its promise of creating a new world of innovation. It also subtly penetrated its competitor’s territory and its user’s mobile devices. The best part is, leb keys is here to stay, as a keyboard that each Lebanese will use, each time they want to chat.

A soft launch communication campaign was done to take initial feedback from the market. As a next step, we are creating a full communication campaign to reach a wider Lebanese audience. As a third step, leb keys should be made available to all the other Arab countries. As a fourth step, the keyboard is being extended to all Arab expats living in Europe, America and Asia.