Mobile Text Entry: An empirical study and analysis of miniñQWERTY keyboards (original) (raw)
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An empirical study of typing rates on mini-QWERTY keyboards
2005
We present a longitudinal study of mini-QWERTY keyboard use, examining the learning rates of novice mini-QWERTY users. The study consists of 20 twenty-minute typing sessions using two different-sized keyboard models. Subjects average over 31 words per minute (WPM) for the first session and increase to an average of 60 WPM by the twentieth. Individual subjects also exceed the upper bound of 60.74 WPM suggested by MacKenzie and Soukoreff's model of two-thumb text entry . We discuss our results in the context of this model.
Design, User Experience, and …, 2011
In this paper, we describe the methodology and the activities of mobile QWERTY research and give examples of different pieces of research and some of the results and insights. To minimize confounding effects of different aspects of QWERTY design, we use virtual keyboard layout tools to construct/replicate different keyboard layout designs so that both human performance and user satisfaction can be captured by systematically varying design parameters in the same testing environment. In addition, we also conduct usability testing by varying specific hardware design parameters and keeping all others constant whenever possible. By using this 2-pronged approach, an empirical performance model of mobile QWERTY keyboard in relation to different design attributes (both perceptual and mechanical) can be built over time. The approach we have adopted in virtual keyboard testing also helps to improve virtual QWERTY keyboard design on touch devices as well as physical QWERTY keyboard layout on devices with physical QWERTY.
Experiences of QWERTY development
During the last decades researchers and industry have published several studies on QWERTY based text input technologies. Many studies have been made about mini-QWERTY and other reduced QWERTY layouts targeted for mobile devices, but usually only English language is used in these studies as input language. Also, there does not seem to be a wide consensus of which kind of layouts are most recommended for mobile devices. Selecting the right QWERTY layout is even more challenging if we take into consideration the number of supported languages versus the number and the size of the QWERTY keys. This paper reviews existing QWERTY layouts for mobile devices and presents constructive critique for using them. Even some critique is presented it is notified that developing QWERTY layouts to mobile devices is always some sort of a compromise. Keeping this in mind this paper proposes methods to make the QWERTY smaller and still usable with multiple different languages. The practical industrial case shows that neither of the tested QWERTY layouts was perfect. However, a layout containing characteristics of both layouts is usable for mobile devices. The case also shows the practical challenges which are often faced by mini-QWERTY developers and finally proposes how these challenges could be solved.
A Study of Variations of Qwerty Soft Keyboards for Mobile
Three recent Qwerty soft keyboard variations are studied: Curve (equivalent to Swype), T+ (equivalent to SureType), and Octopus (equivalent to the Blackberry Z10 keyboard). In an experiment with 12 participants, the Octopus keyboard surpassed the standard Qwerty keyboard by the 4 th phrase entered, reaching an entry speed of 70 wpm on the 9 th phrase. The standard Qwerty soft keyboard had a mean entry speed of 54 wpm. The Curve is shown to be the least efficient of the Qwerty variations with a mean entry speed of 35 wpm. It is also the most error prone of the four keyboards. The T+ keyboard is shown, through the power law of learning, that it can surpass the standard Qwerty keyboard in entry speed after about 19 phrases of input.
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '12, 2012
With the rise of current smartphones, virtual keyboards for touchscreens became the dominant mobile text entry technique. We developed a typing game that records how users touch on the standard Android keyboard to investigate users' typing behaviour. 47,770,625 keystrokes from 72,945 installations have been collected by publishing the game. By visualizing the touch distribution we identified a systematic skew and derived a function that compensates this skew by shifting touch events. By updating the game we conduct an experiment that investigates the effect of shifting touch events, changing the keys' labels, and visualizing the touched position. Results based on 6,603,659 keystrokes and 13,013 installations show that visualizing the touched positions using a simple dot decreases the error rate of the Android keyboard by 18.3% but also decreases the speed by 5.2% with no positive effect on learnability. The Android keyboard outperforms the control condition but the constructed shift function further improves the performance by 2.2% and decreases the error rate by 9.1%. We argue that the shift function can improve existing keyboards at no costs.
Ninth IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC'05), 2005
In a mobile environment, the amount of visual attention a person can devote to a computer is often limited. In addition to typing rapidly and accurately, it is important to be able to enter text with limited visual feedback. Previously we found that users can effectively type in such "blind" conditions with the Twiddler one-handed keyboard. In this paper we examine blind typing on mini-QWERTY keyboards and introduce a taxonomy for blind mobile text input. We present a study in which eight expert mini-QWERTY typists participated in 5 typing sessions. Each session consists of three twenty minute typing conditions. In the first condition, the control or "normal" condition, the participant had full visual access to both the keyboard and the display. In the second condition, "single blind," we obstructed view of the keyboard. The final "double blind" condition also reduced visual feedback from the display. In contrast to our Twiddler work, we found that in the visually impaired conditions, typing rate and accuracy suffer, never reaching the nonblind rates. Across the blind mini-QWERTY conditions our participants averaged 45.8 wpm at 85.6% accuracy, while blind typing on the Twiddler averaged 47.3 wpm at 93.9% accuracy. We discuss these results in the context of our previous blind typing work and examine the trade-offs between the different keyboards for mobile and wearable computer use.
Analysis of User Experience and Performance at Initial Exposure to Novel Keyboard Input Methods
2018
We evaluated user performance and user experience with two novel input methods for mobile devices: Minuum and MessagEase. Subjects used a Qwerty keyboard to give a performance baseline. We compared input speeds, error rates, and keystroke counts among all three inputs to understand what factors discourage continued use or widespread adoption of new keyboard formats. It was found that MessagEase performed poorly upon initial exposure in terms of speed and error rate at 1482 mSec per character and 35.75% errors per line. Being 82.8% slower and 81.1% more error prone than Qwerty, there was a strong correlation between negative opinions of MessagEase and user performance. For Minuum, the performance gap was less significant at 32.1% slower speeds and 50.9% greater error rate. Accordingly Minuum was correlated with a better overall user experience compared to MessagEase. keywords: Soft Controls; Empirical Study; HCI; Mobile User Experience; Mobile Keyboards; Touchscreen
Text Input on Mobile Devices from Cultural and Educational Aspects
Tablet computers and other mobile devices are widely used in education and other life activities. However, touch screen keyboards are not adapted to languages using alphabets with more letters than the English alphabet has. In this paper, we analyze the existing keyboards on such devices for various languages, influence of keyboard usability on the number of typing errors, and propose keyboard design guidelines for non-English languages. As an example, the layout for the Lithuanian language keyboard (32 native letters and 3 foreign letters) has been presented here. The described solution is not strictly related to the peculiarities of the Lithuanian language alphabet (apart from the number of letters), therefore it is suitable for other languages using a similar number of letters.
Comparison of Three QWERTY Keyboards for a Smartwatch
Interacting with Computers, 2016
The QWERTY keyboard has been a de facto standard for computer text entry and continues to be one for mobile text entry such as for smartphones. It is not clear, however, that it will continue to be an option for text entry for much smaller devices such as smartwatches. In a series of user experiments, we examined the performance of the QWERTY keyboard when it is reduced to fit a small smartwatch screen. At the same time, we examined whether the ZoomBoard and the SplitBoard, which are QWERTY keyboards augmented by zooming and panning strategies, respectively, would be effective in comparison with a plain QWERTY keyboard. In Experiment 1, we evaluated the text entry performance of new users on the three QWERTY keyboards. In Experiment 2, we evaluated the relative performance of the three keyboards for three different screen sizes. In Experiment 3, we further observed how the keyboard performance changed when used in a mobile situation. Main results are: (i) users could adapt to a plain QWERTY keyboard even in the smallest screen cases. (ii) The SplitBoard consistently showed a better performance than other keyboards in all tested sizes. (iii) The SplitBoard showed a better performance than other keyboards in a mobile condition (treadmill) and was preferred most by participants. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS • We examined the performances of the ZoomBoard and the SplitBoard in comparison with a plain QWERTY keyboard for three different screen size conditions and for static and mobile usage conditions. • The SplitBoard showed a better performance than the other keyboards consistently in all conditions and was preferred most by the participants. • In addition, we could observe that the participants could adapt to a plain QWERTY keyboard surprisingly well even in the smallest screen case.
Telematics and informatics reports, 2023
Current trends in keyboard design show that QWERTY-similarity is a key factor for high user-adaptability keyboard design. This design approach has the challenge that the higher the similarity the lower the text-entry rate for the optimized keyboard. This article reports on the findings of an empirical study which we conducted on QWERTY-users to measure the effect of using an entry-level keyboard in improving user-ability to adapt to a new keyboard. The study used two Central-Bantu physical keyboards (entry-level: with high QWERTY-similarity, and advanced-level: with low similarity) which we had designed in an earlier study. The empirical study obtained learning-curves of the Advanced-level keyboard, of a 12-participant group which was first introduced to an entry-level keyboard, against a control-group of similar size, in a longitudinal study design. A two-sample t-test on the empirical results showed that the entry-level approach caused a marginally significant text-entry-rate improvement of 9.4% with p < .09. A two-sample U-test on word-error rates indicated a non-significant improvement of 8.4%. Our study has shown that the use of entry keyboards is an effective strategy in improving keyboard user-adaptability.