ABSTRACT
Touch screen surfaces large enough for ten-finger input have become increasingly popular, yet typing on touch screens pales in comparison to physical keyboards. We examine typing patterns that emerge when expert users of physical keyboards touch-type on a flat surface. Our aim is to inform future designs of touch screen keyboards, with the ultimate goal of supporting touch-typing with limited tactile feedback. To study the issues inherent to flat-glass typing, we asked 20 expert typists to enter text under three conditions: (1) with no visual keyboard and no feedback on input errors, then (2) with and (3) without a visual keyboard, but with some feedback. We analyzed touch contact points and hand contours, looking at attributes such as natural finger positioning, the spread of hits among individual keys, and the pattern of non-finger touches. We also show that expert typists exhibit spatially consistent key press distributions within an individual, which provides evidence that eyes-free touch-typing may be possible on touch surfaces and points to the role of personalization in such a solution. We conclude with implications for design.
Supplemental Material
- Al Faraj, K., Mojahid, M., and Vigouroux, N. 2009. BigKey: A Virtual Keyboard for Mobile Devices. Proc. HCII, 3--10. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Barrett, J. 1994. Performance effects of reduced proprioceptive feedback on touch typists and casual users in a typing task. Behaviour & Information Tech. 13 (6), 373--381.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Benko, H., Morris, M. R., Brush, A.J.B., Wilson, A.D. 2009. Insights on Interactive Tabletops: A Survey of Researchers and Developers. Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2009--22. March, 2009.Google Scholar
- Cooper. E. (ed.). 1983. Cognitive Aspects of Skilled Typewriting. Springer-Verlag, New York, NY.Google Scholar
- Go, K., and Endo, Y. 2007. CATKey: customizable and adaptable touchscreen keyboard with bubble cursor-like visual feedback. Proc. HCII, 493--496. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Goldstein, M., Book, R., Alsiö, G., and Tessa, S. 1999. Non-keyboard QWERTY touch typing: a portable input interface for the mobile user. Proc. CHI'99, 32--39. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Goodman, J., Venolia, G., Steury, K., and Parker, C. 2002. Language modeling for soft keyboards. Proc. AAAI'02, 419--424. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Grudin, J.T. 1984. Error patterns in skilled and novice transcription typing. In Cognitive Aspects of Skilled Typewriting, W. E. Cooper (ed.). New York: Springer-Verlag, 121--143.Google Scholar
- Gunawardana, A., Paek, T., and Meek, C. 2010. Usability guided key-target resizing for soft keyboards. Proc. IUI '10, 111--118. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hartmann, B., Morris, M. R., Benko, H., and Wilson, A. D. 2009. Augmenting interactive tables with mice & keyboards. Proc. UIST '09, 149--152. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Himberg, J., Häkkilä, J., Kangas, P., and Mäntyjärvi, J. 2003. On-line personalization of a touch screen based keyboard. Proc. IUI'03, 77--84. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hinrichs, U., Hancock, M., Collins, C., Carpendale, S. 2007. Examination of text-entry methods for tabletop displays. Proc. Tabletop 2007, 105--112.Google Scholar
- Kristensson, P. and Zhai, S. 2004. SHARK2: a large vocabulary shorthand writing system for pen-based computers. Proc. UIST '04, 43--52. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kristensson, P. and Zhai, S. 2005. Relaxing stylus typing precision by geometric pattern matching. Proc. IUI '05, 151--158. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Langendorf, D.J.: Textware solution's Fitaly keyboard v1.0 easing the burden of keyboard input. WinCELair Review, February 1998.Google Scholar
- Lankford, C. 2000. Effective eye-gaze input into Windows. Proc. ETRA '00, 23--27. Google ScholarDigital Library
- McAdam, C., Brewster, S. 2009. Distal tactile feedback for text entry on tabletop computers. Proc. BCS-HCI'09, 504--511. Google ScholarDigital Library
- MacKenzie, I.S. 2002. A note on calculating text entry speed. http://www.yorku.ca/mack/RN-TextEntrySpeed.html.Google Scholar
- MacKenzie, I.S., Soukoreff, R. W. 2003. Phrase sets for evaluating text entry techniques. Ext. Abstr. CHI '03, 754--755. Google ScholarDigital Library
- MacKenzie, I.S., Zhang, S. X. 1999. The design and evaluation of a high-performance soft keyboard. Proc. CHI '99, 25--31. Google ScholarDigital Library
- MacKenzie, I.S., Zhang, S. X. 2001. An empirical investigation of the novice experience with soft keyboards. Behaviour & Information Technology, 20, 411--418.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Morris, M.R., Lombardo, J., Wigdor, D. 2010. WeSearch: Supporting Collaborative Search and Sensemaking on a Tabletop Display. Proc. CSCW 2010, 401--410. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Rashid, D. R., Smith, N. A. 2008. Relative keyboard input system. Proc. IUI'08, 397--400. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Roeber, H., Bacus, J., Tomasi, C. 2003. Typing in thin air: the Canesta projection keyboard--a new method of interaction with electronic devices. Proc. CHI '03, 712--713. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ryall, K., Forlines, C., Shen, C., Ringel Morris, M., Everitt, K. 2006. Experiences with and Observations of Direct-Touch Tabletops. Proc. Tabletop 2006, 89--96. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Salthouse, T.A. 1986. Perceptual, cognitive, and motoric aspects of transcription typing. Psych. Bulletin 99(3), 303--319.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sears, A., Revis, D., Swatski, J., Crittenden, R., Shneiderman, B. 1993. Investigating touchscreen typing: the effect of keyboard size on typing speed. Behavour & Information Technology 12(1), 17--22.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Shein, F., Hamann, G., Brownlow, N., Treviranus, J., Milner, M. and Parnes, P. 1991. WiViK: A visual keyboard for Windows 3.0. Proc. RESNA '91, 160--162.Google Scholar
- Soukoreff, R. W. and MacKenzie, I. S. 2001. Measuring errors in text entry tasks: an application of the Levenshtein string distance statistic. Proc. CHI '01, 319--320. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tinwala, H., & MacKenzie, I. S. (in press). Eyes-free text entry with error correction on touchscreen mobile devices. Proc. NordiCHI 2010 (to appear). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Weiss, M., Wagner, J., Jansen, Y., Jennings, R., Khoshabeh, R., Hollan, J. D., and Borchers, J. 2009. SLAP widgets: bridging the gap between virtual and physical controls on tabletops. Proc. CHI '09, 481--49. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wigdor, D., Penn, G., Ryall, K., Esenther, A., Shen, C. 2007. Living with a Tabletop: Analysis and Observations of Long Term Office Use of a Multi-Touch Table. Proc. Tabletop 2007, 60--67.Google Scholar
- Wobbrock, J.O., Morris, M.R., Wilson, A.D. 2009. User-defined gestures for surface computing. Proc. CHI '09, 1083--1092. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wobbrock, J.O. and Myers, B.A. 2006. Analyzing the input stream for character-level errors in unconstrained text entry evaluations. ACM TOCHI 13(4), 458--489. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zhai, S., M. Hunter, and B.A. Smith. 2000. The Metropolis Keyboard--an exploration of quantitative techniques for virtual keyboard design. Proc. UIST 2000, 119--218. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zhai, S. and Kristensson, P. 2003. Shorthand writing on stylus keyboard. Proc. CHI '03, 97--104. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zhai, S., Smith, B.A., Hunter, M. 2002. Performance Optimization of Virtual Keyboards. Human-Computer Interaction 17(2&3), 229 - 269.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Zhai, S., Sue, A., Accot, J. 2002. Movement model, hits distribution and learning in virtual keyboarding. Proc. CHI '02, 17--24.. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Typing on flat glass: examining ten-finger expert typing patterns on touch surfaces
Recommendations
Improving Virtual Keyboards When All Finger Positions Are Known
UIST '15: Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & TechnologyCurrent virtual keyboards are known to be slower and less convenient than physical QWERTY keyboards because they simply imitate the traditional QWERTY keyboards on touchscreens. In order to improve virtual keyboards, we consider two reasonable ...
Pinch-drag-flick vs. spatial input: rethinking zoom & pan on mobile displays
CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsThe multi-touch-based pinch to zoom, drag and flick to pan metaphor has gained wide popularity on mobile displays, where it is the paradigm of choice for navigating 2D documents. But is finger-based navigation really the gold standard' In this paper, we ...
Sandwich keyboard: fast ten-finger typing on a mobile device with adaptive touch sensing on the back side
MobileHCI '13: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices and servicesThis Note introduces a keyboard design that affords ten-finger touch typing by utilizing a touch sensor on the back side of a device. Previous work has used physical buttons. Using a touch sensor has the benefit that it retains the form factor and does ...
Comments