FlickBoard: A simple split soft keyboard for small touch screens

Abstract

Text entry on a smartwatch is a challenging problem due to the limited screen area of a smartwatch. In this paper, we introduce the FlickBoard, a soft keyboard for a smartwatch. As a user flicks left or right on the touch screen, the FlickBoard switches between the left and the right halves of a QWERTY keyboard. Na"ive as the idea of the FlickBoard may sound, it outperformed the ZoomBoard, the QWERTY-like keypad and a tap-and-slide design that we call S-board. The FlickBoard is a viable option for smartwatch text entry due to its light processing requirement, good performance, and immediate usability thanks to the QWERTY layout. Showing that FlickBoard can outperform QWERTY keyboard in a smartwatch, the result implies that a performance of a keyboard differs, depending on the size of the keyboard. Therefore, this study further analyzes the performances of keyboards with different sizes which are from 16.5 to 29.3 mm width and height. As expected, the performance of keyboards was better as the size gets bigger. The result showed that the performance of the QWERTY keyboard is influenced by the size more than FlickBoard and ZoomBoard. However, the performances of the QWERTY keyboard were much different in the first comparison experiment and the experiment about relation between the size and the performance. The difference was partly caused by the difference of devices. The experiment design would be another factor of causing the difference.