Usability Evaluation of Virtual Keyboard Supporting Touch Area Optimization Through Input Pattern Learning
Suyeon Kang, Jiyoung Kim, Minhee Park, Hojeong Im, Huhn Kim · Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea · 2019
Objective: The purpose of this study was to verify the usability of two typical smartphone virtual keyboards that optimize the touch area of each key by learning touch input patterns.BRBRBackground: Virtual keyboards have many limitations due to their small size and lack of tactile feedback. Therefore, many studies have been conducted to improve the usability of the virtual keyboard. Among them, the verification on the usefulness of a virtual keyboard, with which optimizes the user’s touch area by learning his or her input pattern, is still insufficient.BRBRMethod: In this study, the participants performed the task of inputting presented sentences using three virtual keyboards (Nota, AL, and Smartboard) that provide different levels of touch optimization support. Through the experiment, sentence matching ratio and typing time data were collected, and subjective satisfaction were also rated after the typing task was finished.BRBRResults: There were significant differences in the sentence matching ratio, typing time, and subjective satisfaction between Nota, AL and Smartboard. The Nota keyboard showed significantly better performances than the Smartboard in all respects. However, the AL keyboard showed no significant difference in sentence matching ratio and typing time compared to the Smartboard without such optimization function. Rather, the AL keyboard was less satisfied than the Smartboard.BRBRConclusion: Automatically optimizing the touch area based on users