Jacob O. Wobbrock
Htet Htet Aung
Brad A. Myers
ABSTRACT
Guessability is essential for symbolic input, in which users enter gestures or keywords to indicate characters or commands, or rely on labels or icons to access features. We present a unified approach to both maximizing and evaluating the guessability of symbolic input. This approach can be used by anyone wishing to design a symbol set with high guessability, or to evaluate the guessability of an existing symbol set. We also present formulae for quantifying guessability and agreement among guesses. An example is offered in which the guessability of the EdgeWrite unistroke alphabet was improved by users from 51.0% to 80.1% without designer intervention. The original and improved alphabets were then tested for their immediate usability with the procedure used by MacKenzie and Zhang (1997). Users entered the original alphabet with 78.8% and 90.2% accuracy after 1 and 5 minutes of learning, respectively. The improved alphabet bettered this to 81.6% and 94.2%. These improved results were competitive with prior results for Graffiti, which were 81.8% and 95.8% for the same measures.
- Brinck, T., Gergle, D. and Wood, S.D. (2001) Usability for the Web. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Fleetwood, M.D., Byrne, M.D., Centgraf, P., Dudziak, K.Q., Lin, B. and Mogilev, D. (2002) An evaluation of text-entry in Palm OS-Graffiti and the virtual keyboard. In Proc. HFES 2002. Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, pp. 617--621.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Furnas, G. W., Landauer, T. K., Gomez, L. M. and Dumais, S. T. (1984) Statistical semantics: Analysis of the potential performance of keyword information systems. In Human Factors in Computer Systems, J.C. Thomas and M.L. Schneider (eds). Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex, pp. 187--242. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Furnas, G. W., Landauer, T. K., Gomez, L. M. and Dumais, S. T. (1987) The vocabulary problem in human-system communication. Communications of the ACM 30 (11), pp. 964--971. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Good, M. D., Whiteside, J. A., Wixon, D. R. and Jones, S. J. (1984) Building a user-derived interface. Communications of the ACM 27 (10), pp. 1032--1043. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Költringer, T. and Grechenig, T. (2004) Comparing the immediate usability of Graffiti 2 and virtual keyboard. In Proc. CHI 2004. ACM Press, pp. 1175--1178. Google ScholarDigital Library
- MacKenzie, I.S. and Zhang, S.X. (1997) The immediate usability of Graffiti. In Proc. Graphics Interface 1997. Canadian Information Processing Society, pp. 129--137. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wiedenbeck, S. (1999) The use of icons and labels in an end user application program: An empirical study of learning and retention. Behavior and Information Technology 18 (2), pp. 68--82.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Wobbrock, J.O., Myers, B.A. and Kembel, J.A. (2003) EdgeWrite: A stylus-based text entry method designed for high accuracy and stability of motion. In Proc. UIST 2003. ACM Press, pp. 61--70. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Maximizing the guessability of symbolic input
Recommendations
In-stroke word completion
UIST '06: Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technologyWe present the design and implementation of a word-level stroking system called Fisch, which is intended to improve the speed of character-level unistrokes. Importantly, Fisch does not alter the way in which character-level unistrokes are made, but ...
A lightweight multistroke recognizer for user interface prototypes
GI '10: Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2010With the expansion of pen- and touch-based computing, new user interface prototypes may incorporate stroke gestures. Many gestures comprise multiple strokes, but building state-of-the-art multistroke gesture recognizers is nontrivial and time-consuming. ...
Designing EdgeWrite Versions for Japanese Text Entry
CW '13: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on CyberworldsThis paper presents our project of designing Edge Write text entry methods for Japanese language. We are developing two versions of Edge Write text entry method for Japanese language: Roman-Kana Edge Write and Katakana Edge Write. Roman-Kana Edge Write ...
Comments