Paper Reading #4: Personalized input: improving ten-finger touchscreen typing through automatic adaptation

Paper Reading #4: Personalized input: improving ten-finger touchscreen typing through automatic adaptation

Intro:

• Title - Personalized input: improving ten-finger touchscreen typing through automatic adaptation
• Reference Information -
  
  

  Author Keywords
  Touchscreen text input, personalization, adaptive interfaces.
  ACM Classification Keywords
  H5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]: User interfaces—input devices and strategies.
  
  Presented at CHI '12
• Author Bios - Leah Findlater and Jacob O. Wobbrock

Leah Findlater - Attends the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.

Jaccob Wobbrock - He is from the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. He is part of    The Information School and the DUB Group there.

     This is both of their's first paper published in the ACM. As they are both just Graduate students, they are fairly new to the world of CHI.

Summary:

This work focused on introducing and evaluating two novel personalized keyboard interfaced, both of which adapt their underlying key-press classification models. One of the keyboards even adapted the location of the keys visually. Since personalized keyboards are still an emerging area of research, they also outline a design space that includes dimensions of adaptation and key-press classification features. Because of their evaluation, they determine pros and cons of different modes of touchscreen typing through automatic adaptation.

Related work not referenced in the paper:

1. High precision touchscreens: design strategies and comparisons with a mouse - Andrew Sears, Ben Schneiderman
2. ThumbSpace: Generalized One-Handed Input for Touchscreen-Based Mobile Devices - Amy K. Karlson and Benjamin B. Bederson
3. Pressure-based text entry for mobile devices - Stephen A. Brewster, Michael Hughes
4. Adaptive interfaces for ubiquitous web access - Daniel Billsus, Clifford Brunk, Craig Evans, Brian Gladish
5. Adaptive Interfaces and Agents - A. Jameson
6. Machine learning for adaptive user interfaces - Pat Langley
7. Exploring the design space for adaptive graphical user interfaces - Daniel S. Weld, Desney Tan, Mary Czerwinski
8. Supporting adaptive interfaces in a knowledge-based user interface environment - James D. Foley, Piyawadee Noi Sukaviriya
9. Experience with adaptive interfaces - D. Benyon, D. Murray
10. An empirical appraisal of the effectiveness of adaptive interfaces for instructional systems - John Eklund, Ken Sinclair

The area of touchscreen input is still an emerging research area, but there has been some significant publications on the many possible builds of touchscreen keyboards. The authors took into account the many past evaluations such as keyboard size and individual key sizes and their effect on speed and accuracy. There is also other work in this area of other types of text input besides the typical QWRETY, such as swipe technique and multiple letters per key. The authors' work is focused more in the touch model area though -- the way in which a key press is detected.

Evaluation:

The evaluation process was a controlled three-session study of 12 participants with both the adaptive and non-adaptive personalized keyboards to a conventional touch keyboard. The main quantitative measurements were speed and uncorrected error rate. The words per minute were calculated for each model and this gave a objective quantitative evaluation. Participants were also asked to rank the three keyboards based on ease of use, efficiency, frustration, comfort, how natural the typing felt, and overall preference. This gave a subjective opinion on the work. This gave a systemic evaluation of the touchscreen, as it was tested on efficiency and likability for if it is practical.

 

Discussion:

I think this work is very impressive. Improvement of keyboard is something that could use some work, especially with touch devices. I think their method has promise and should be continued to be evaluated, as it could definitely benefit users during this rise of touchscreen devices. I do not think it was necessarily a novel idea, because it is mainly just improving the keyboard. I do think it is important though and, as the results show, could definitely improve the touch keyboards. The evaluation was appropriate, and I think it was one of the more important parts of this project, as it showed some pros and cons of visual adaptive keyboards.