Hand Posture's Effect on Touch Screen Text Input Behaviors: A Touch Area Based Study

TL;DR

This study analyzes how different hand postures affect touch input behaviors on smartphones, emphasizing the importance of touch area data for improving error correction in soft keyboards.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of touch area data across various postures, expanding previous work that only considered touch points, and highlights significant differences in input behavior.

Findings

Significant differences in touch offsets when considering touch area versus touch points.

Posture influences error rates and touch behavior metrics.

Touch area data provides more accurate insights for keyboard design improvements.

Abstract

Mobile devices with touch keyboards have become ubiquitous, but text entry on these devices remains slow and errorprone. Understanding touch patterns during text entry could be useful in designing robust error-correction algorithms for soft keyboards. In this paper, we present an analysis of text input behaviors on a soft QWERTY keyboard in three different text entry postures: index finger only, one thumb, and two thumb. Our work expands on the work of [1] by considering the entire surface area of digit contact with the smartphone keyboard, rather than interpreting each touch as a single point. To do this, we captured touch areas for every key in a lab study with 8 participants and calculated offsets, error rates, and size measurements. We then repeated the original experiment described in [1] and showed that significant differences exist when basing offset calculations on touch area compared to touch points for two postures.