A reduced QWERTY keyboard for mobile text entry

  • Authors:
  • Nathan Green;Jan Kruger;Chirag Faldu;Robert St. Amant

  • Affiliations:
  • North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC

  • Venue:
  • CHI '04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

In this paper we describe a specialized keyboard for text entry that maps four rows of a standard keyboard onto the home row, with different characters encoded via modifier keys and multi-tap input. Use of the keyboard also relies on lexicon-based disambiguation. This design has two motivations: limiting physical space requirements and capitalizing on user knowledge of the standard QWERTY keyboard layout. The resulting "stick" keyboard is between 15% and 25% of the size of a standard keyboard. In a preliminary empirical study, users reached half of their normal typing speed using lexicon-based disambiguation (22.5 wpm) and a reasonable but lower speed with multi-tap input (10.4 wpm) with only a few minutes of practice.