Text Input on a Smartwatch QWERTY Keyboard: Tap vs. Trace

Turner, Colton; Chaparro, Barbara S.; He, Jibo

doi:10.1080/10447318.2016.1223265

Cited by 21 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…The metrics gathered in this study replicate and expand upon those used in Turner et al (2017Turner et al ( , 2018. Text input method (tap vs. trace vs. handwriting) and mobility (standing vs. walking a simple route vs. walking a complex route) were the independent variables.…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 78%

Typing on a Smartwatch While Mobile: A Comparison of Input Methods

Turner¹,

Chaparro

2020

Hum Factors

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Objective The user experience of typing on a smartwatch was evaluated with three unique input methods (tap, trace, and handwriting) while standing and while walking. Background Despite widespread development within the technology industry, smartwatches have had a relatively slow adoption worldwide compared to smartphones. One limiting factor of smartwatches has been the lack of an efficient means of text entry. The 2017 release of Android Wear addressed this issue by providing support for native text entry (i.e., tap, trace, and handwriting). Determining how user performance and subjective ratings compare across these input methods is essential to understanding their contribution to smartwatch user experience. Method Twenty college-age individuals typed phrases using tap, trace, and handwriting input on a smartwatch in three different mobility scenarios (standing, walking a simple course, walking a complex course). Results Participants typed faster with trace (30 words per minute; WPM) than with tap (20 WPM) and handwriting (18 WPM), regardless of mobility. Trace also outperformed tap and handwriting across all subjective metrics, regardless of mobility. Conclusion Trace input appears to be especially well suited for typing on a smartwatch as it was found to be objectively and subjectively superior to tap and handwriting regardless of user mobility. Objectively, typing speeds with trace are shown to be nearly two times faster than most alternative input methods described in the literature. Application Results suggest smartwatch manufacturers should include QWERTY keyboards with trace input as a standard feature in order to provide the best overall typing experience for their users.

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 78%

Typing on a Smartwatch While Mobile: A Comparison of Input Methods

Turner¹,

Chaparro

2020

Hum Factors

Self Cite

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“…Finally, more recent studies try to solve the problem by providing statistical word models, without causing modifications on QWERTY layout. Examples of work with this strategy are WatchWriter [9], Velocitap [32] and the method analyzed in Turner et al [30]. These works seem to inspire current industry adopted methods, such as Google's WearOS default QWERTY keyboard, which relies heavily on tracing gestures for word composition and predictions.…”

Section: Related Work 21 Text Entry On Smartwatchesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Braille text entry on smartwatches

Luna

Soares

Nascimento

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems

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Smartwatches are gaining popularity on market with a set of features comparable to smartphones in a wearable device. This novice technology brings new interaction paradigms and challenges for blind users, who have difficulties dealing with touchscreens. Among a variety of tasks that must be studied, text entry is analyzed, considering that current existing solutions may be unsatisfactory (as voice input) or even unfeasible (as working with tiny QWERTY keyboards) for a blind user. More specifically, this paper presents a study on possible solutions for composing a Braille cell on smartwatches. Five prototypes were developed and different feedback features were proposed. These are confronted with seven specialists on an evaluation study that results in a qualitative analysis of which strategies can be more useful for blind users in a Braille text entry.

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“…Finally, Turner at al. [27] used the commercial gesture keyboard Swype to investigate tap and trace input on a smartwatch. In a user study, participants wrote at 37 wpm using the trace method and 27 wpm using the tap method.…”

Section: Smartwatch Text Entrymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Word, Multiple Word, and Sentence Input on Virtual Keyboard Decoding Performance

Vertanen

Fletcher

Gaines

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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Entering text on non-desktop computing devices is often done via an onscreen virtual keyboard. Input on such keyboards normally consists of a sequence of noisy tap events that specify some amount of text, most commonly a single word. But is single word-at-a-time entry the best choice? This paper compares user performance and recognition accuracy of wordat-a-time, phrase-at-a-time, and sentence-at-a-time text entry on a smartwatch keyboard. We evaluate the impact of differing amounts of input in both text copy and free composition tasks. We found providing input of an entire sentence significantly improved entry rates from 26 wpm to 32 wpm while keeping character error rates below 4%. In offline experiments with more processing power and memory, sentence input was recognized with a much lower 2.0% error rate. Our findings suggest virtual keyboards can enhance performance by encouraging users to provide more input per recognition event.

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Text Input on a Smartwatch QWERTY Keyboard: Tap vs. Trace

Cited by 21 publications

References 11 publications

Typing on a Smartwatch While Mobile: A Comparison of Input Methods

Typing on a Smartwatch While Mobile: A Comparison of Input Methods

Braille text entry on smartwatches

The Impact of Word, Multiple Word, and Sentence Input on Virtual Keyboard Decoding Performance

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