Métamorphe: augmenting hotkey usage with actuated keys

  • Authors:
  • Gilles Bailly;Thomas Pietrzak;Jonathan Deber;Daniel J. Wigdor

  • Affiliations:
  • Telekom Innovation Laboratories, TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany;Université de Lille 1, Lille, France;University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada;University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Hotkeys are an efficient method of selecting commands on a keyboard. However, these shortcuts are often underused by users. We present Métamorphe, a novel keyboard with keys that can be individually raised and lowered to promote hotkeys usage. Métamorphe augments the output of traditional keyboards with haptic and visual feedback, and offers a novel design space for user input on raised keys (e.g., gestures such as squeezing or pushing the sides of a key). We detail the implementation of Métamorphe and discuss design factors. We also report two user studies. The first is a user-defined interface study that shows that the new input vocabulary is usable and useful, and provides insights into the mental models that users associate with raised keys. The second user study shows improved eyes-free selection performance for raised keys as well as the surrounding unraised keys.