Paper Reading #22: Usability guided key-target resizing for soft keyboards

Comments:

TBD

Reference Information:

Title: Usability guided key-target resizing for soft keyboards

Authors: Asela Gunawardana, Tim Paek, and Christopher Meek of Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

Presentation Venue: IUI '10 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces

Summary:

The researchers at Microsoft are attempting to find a way to make the input from users working with soft keyboards less error prone and easier to use. They have engineered a technique they refer to as anchored dynamic key-targets in order to accomplish this goal.

They have found that this technique appears to reduce the amount of error over other state-of-the art solutions. These findings come despite the lack of haptic feedback or the lack of traditional hard keyboard solutions that people are most used to currently.

Discussion:

Since I decided to test drive one of Microsoft's Windows 7 phones for awhile to see how it all worked, I would love it if they could improve the soft keys found on it. I found that the learning curve on the built-in soft keyboards was considerable and I still make a lot of mistakes to this day. I see myself making similar mistakes when using other similar solutions, such as on the iPhone, etc.

Any fix they could make would be welcome. I am getting better at it, but from what it sounds like in this paper, I think there could be many improvements that I would appreciate with the technology that I am using. Perhaps it will provide some innovation and drive the development of additional systems in future devices that have yet to be produced.