Touch typing performance with sensory feedback on a flat keyboard
Abstract
As touchscreen devices like smartphones and tablet PCs are becoming more pervasive, finger typing on a flat keyboard (either an on-screen soft keyboard on a glass or a slim keyboard that serves as a touchscreen cover) is commonplace. With a larger screen size, people are able to touch type with multiple fingers instead of tapping with a single finger. Unlike physical keyboards, typing on a flat surface is difficult due to its limitations such as lack of feedback, flatness, occlusion, etc. The aim of this thesis is to understand how sensory feedback that is available on a flat keyboard during touch typing might improve user performance. A series of experiments are conducted to examine how visual, haptic, and auditory keyclick feedback affect typing performance. The results indicate that haptic keyclick feedback leads to the highest typing speed with the lowest total error rate among all feedback conditions. We also examine the benefit of multimodality and information content in the sensory feedback. The results show that combined multiple modalities of sensory feedback as well as feedback with key-correctness information improve typing performance. Finally, we also examine the effect of feedback signal on touch typing performance. We first study how different haptic feedback signals affect typing performance by comparing keyclick and simple vibration haptic feedback signals. The results show that keyclick haptic feedback outperforms simple vibration in typing performance. We then study how intensity of feedback signals affects typing performance. The results show that the intensity of haptic feedback affects typing performance while the intensity of auditory feedback does not. Overall, the results of this thesis provide useful design guidelines for improving touch typing performance on a flat keyboard with sensory feedback information.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Tan, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Computer Engineering|Computer science
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