Text Entry Performance Evaluation of Haptic Soft QWERTY Keyboard on a Tablet Device

Recently touch screens are widely used for mobile devices to provide intuitive and natural interactions with fingertips. However, the lack of tactile feedback makes it difficult for users to receive key-click confirmation during text entry on soft keyboards. This paper examines the effect of tactile feedback on typing performance with the soft QWERTY keyboard: the most commonly used multi-finger text entry method on tablet devices. We implemented tactile feedback hardware and software to simulate the key-click effect on a commercially-available mobile tablet (Microsoft Surface Pro). We conducted a typing experiment to measure user performance and preference. The participants transcribed given phrases under three sensory feedback conditions: visual only, visual and audio, and visual and tactile. The results are unexpected; we did not find any significant difference in terms of typing performance, and user preference was as positive as the audio condition though better received than the visual only condition. This study thus reports different findings from previous work studying text entry on handheld devices, encouraging further examinations to fully understand the effect of tactile feedback on text entry in tablet devices.