The 1line keyboard: a QWERTY layout in a single line

ABSTRACT

Current soft QWERTY keyboards often consume a large portion of the screen space on portable touchscreens. This space consumption can diminish the overall user experi-ence on these devices. In this paper, we present the 1Line keyboard, a soft QWERTY keyboard that is 140 pixels tall (in landscape mode) and 40% of the height of the native iPad QWERTY keyboard. Our keyboard condenses the three rows of keys in the normal QWERTY layout into a single line with eight keys. The sizing of the eight keys is based on users' mental layout of a QWERTY keyboard on an iPad. The system disambiguates the word the user types based on the sequence of keys pressed. The user can use flick gestures to perform backspace and enter, and tap on the bezel below the keyboard to input a space. Through an evaluation, we show that participants are able to quickly learn how to use the 1Line keyboard and type at a rate of over 30 WPM after just five 20-minute typing sessions. Using a keystroke level model, we predict the peak expert text entry rate with the 1Line keyboard to be 66--68 WPM.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction devices

      • Touch screens