1Line Keyboard

A QWERTY Layout in a Single Line

UIST’11, October 16–19, 2011

intro

• WHAT soft QWERTY keyboard

• WHY soft QWERTY keyboard takes significant amount of screen space

• HOW condenses the three rows of character keys in the QWERTY layout into a single line with eight keys

Related Works

• T9

• Braille touch

• Stick Keyboard

basic concept

• to combine each column of the keys in the QWERTY keyboard into one key in order to save space

• maintaining the familiar QWERTY layout

• each key is now associated with multiple letters, this design needs to perform word disambiguation

• flick gestures to replace backspace and enter keys

• tapping gesture on the bezel as spacebar

key layout & size

• Participants’ mental layout of a QWERTY keyboard on an iPad. The units are in pixels.

• The four boxes show how we designed the layout of the buttons in the 1Line keyboard.

• The height of the buttons was chosen to reflect the highest and lowest error bars of the home row (circled in red).

• To maintain symmetry we designed the left-handed buttons and mirrored them to the right (only left-handed buttons are shown here).

word disambiguation

algorithm suggests the most frequently-used word first, depending on the sequence of the

key pressed

flick gestures

One-finger left flick Backspace (hold to repeat)

One-finger right flick Enter

One-finger down flick Navigates to the next word in the word disambiguation list (hold to repeat)

One-finger up flick Navigates to the previous word in the word disambiguation list (hold to repeat)

Two-finger left flick Deletes the whole word

bezel tap detection

• took advantage of existing hardware :MEMS(Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) accelerometer

• acceleration spike occurs & touch-down event does not happen concurrently, the system considers the spike as a tap on the bezel

user evaluation

typing sessions to gain an understanding of the initial usability of the 1Line keyboard and its learning curve

application session to collect qualitative & quantitative data of experience with the 1Line keyboard to make presentation slides

spacebar session to evaluate our bezel tap detection.

results : typing session

• the overall text entry rate for both keyboards

(iPad: top, 1Line: bottom)

• the mental demand for both keyboards

(iPad: dark, 1Line: light)

results : application session

• the average distance scrolled while completing the tasks for each slide was

- 1Line keyboard : 1325 pixels (SD: 846)

- iPad keyboard : 2828 pixels (SD: 1819)

results : spacebar session

• with spacebar : 35.3 WPM

• with bezel spacebar : 32.2 WPM

• bezel spacebar degraded performance by 8.8%

• saves the space used by the soft spacebar, 117 pixels tall (~22mm)

difficulties

• The inaccuracies of the bezel spacebar detection algorithm caused some false positives and false negatives

• With disambiguation, it was difficult to catch a typo in the beginning of a word

• difficult to keep track of where i was in a word

• sometimes, have to press one of the keys too many times(e.g. “indeed”)

• If a wrong word is selected by accident, the user would need to backspace and start from the very top of the list again

likes

• scroll less

• the larger keys are more comfortable to touch

• able to type with long nails

• adapted to gestures without troubles

• swiping, it makes typing easiermore like a reflex rather than go and find another key

areas of improvements

• adaptive word disambiguation

• integration of auto-correction

• richer gesture set

• more robust tap detection

future work

• an adaptation of the 1Line keyboard to a handheld touchscreen, the screen in these devices is even more limited than a tablet device

• tabletop surface

• system would allow the user to type accurately as long as it detects which finger is used for typing each letter instead of which key is pressed. Thus, the 1Line keyboard on a tabletop surface could liberate the user from concerns about hitting the wrong keys or homing the hand to a generic keyboard layout given by the system

sample video clip

discussion

• 새로운 키보드 레이아웃을 적용시키기위한 seamless한 방법이 뭘까? - 러닝커브를 낮춘다, 익숙하게 비슷하게 만든다, ... - 획기적인 변화는 어떻게 가능 할수 있나

• 여기서 제시하는 키보드의 멘탈 레이아웃이 과연 적절한 것일까? 더 좋은 방법으로 멘탈 레이아웃을 그리려면...

• 말을 전달하기 위해서 글을쓰고 또 잘 쓰기위해 도구가 만들어 졌다. 즉 말이 글과 도구에 영향을 미쳤다면, 요즘은 글과 도구가 오히려 말의 구성과 전달 방식에 영향을 주고 있지는 않은가 생각해 본다.