Reference Information:
Performance Optimizations of Virtual Keyboards for Stroke-Based Text Entry on a Touch-Based Tabletop by Jochen Rick.
Published in the UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology.
Author Bio:
Jochen Rick currently works at Saarland University as a faculty member. He has a PhD in computer science which he obtained from Georgia Tech.
Summary:
Hypothesis:
The layout of the keyboard plays a huge role in the effectiveness and speed of user input on a touch screen device.
Methods:
There were 8 test subjects who preformed various tasks such as drawing through various points, in order to help Dr. Rick obtain data on where to best place letters.
Results:
As expected, the QWERTY keyboard underperformed. It is noted that this is expected due to the fact that the keyboard was not designed with a swype style input in mind. His Hexagon OSK, Square OSK and OPTI II keyboard layouts provided a much better input speed.
Contents:
Obviously the purpose of this paper was to correct deficiencies in currently existing keyboard layouts. While the QWERTY keyboard has been great for 'normal' typing, it has some problems in a mobile or touch screen environment. He documents his data from the tests and explains how all of that information is applied to an algorithm to create a more intuitive keyboard layout.
Discussion:
This article was awesome. I use swype on my android phone currently and have always thought that they layout of the keyboard was not at all condusive to being able to easily enter text. A new layout would do wonders for quick and accurate text entry. A new arrangement of letters also means that it could be easier to resolve what a word is suppose to be, rather than simple narrowing it down to 4 or 5 possibilities, which is what currently happens. Overall a very interesting read and hopefully something that will see more devleopment in the future.
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