Considering how much typing on a glass touchscreen blows in
comparison to using hard keys, it's easy to imagine how Blackberry saw
the first iPhone back in 2007 and thought, "Bah, this isn't a threat."
We all know how that turned out. But typing on glass still blows, and
voice dictation on mobile devices (while pretty awesome) isn't a good
fit for every situation. So how can we un-blowify touchscreen typing?
Two interesting software-design approaches have recently emerged:
one rethinks how the keyboard looks, while the other
rethinks how the keyboard acts. (Spoiler alert: I think the latter has more potential.)
KALQ,
an experimental system developed by a team of HCI researchers including
Per Ola Kristensson (whose distraction-reducing display interface I
wrote about
here),
takes the standard QWERTY keyboard layout and redesigns its layout to
reflect mobile-device usage patterns (well, one in particular: gripping a
phablet or tablet in landscape view with both hands and typing with
one's thumbs). KALQ takes its name from its redistribution of the QWERTY
keys. It splits the keyboard into two mini-keyboards: one on the left,
one on the right, each positioned within easy striking distance of the
thumb on each hand, with the letters laid out in such a way to maximize
efficiency. For example, the researchers discovered that oft-typed words
like "on," "see," "you," and "read" must be typed solely with one thumb
if the QWERTY keyboard is simply split in half. Typing entire words
(even short ones) with one thumb is slow and awkward. So they
redistributed the keys across the two "boards" to make a better
ergonomic fit for these word-usage frequencies.
The result? A 34% boost in typing speed. The catch? It'll take four
to eight hours of training to be able to use it at a level of fluency
equivalent to a standard QWERTY keyboard, and more hours to get faster.
Meanwhile, a startup called Syntellia has created a soft keyboard called
Fleksy
that is also dedicated to making touchscreen typing less cumbersome.
It's still a QWERTY keyboard, though. Instead, Fleksy uses a beefed-up
autocorrection/prediction engine under the hood to minimize typing
errors. It's so beefed-up, in fact, that you can use it to type
accurately
without even seeing the keys. So
blaze away as fast and out-of-control on your glass screen as you like —
Fleksy's software will mop up your mistakes. (In theory. I tried it
myself on iOS and was encumbered by the weird gesture it makes you use
instead of hitting a spacebar button. If they'd kept that in, I'd have
been much faster.)
Both KALQ and Fleksy are flawed but technologically impressive
solutions to similar problems. KALQ, though, seems like a design
solution wrought in a vacuum. It asks,
What if we could redesign keyboards from scratch to better fit how we use mobile devices now? The trouble is that keyboards don't exist in a vacuum, and they don’t only exist now. The QWERTY layout is an interface that,
over the past 135 years,
has become culture: it exists across many domains, anywhere that text
input goes into a machine, not just touchscreen mobile devices in 2013.
It's what people
expect when they have to or want to input text
with their hands. Sure, the original technological reasons for that
QWERTY layout— to prevent jams in the physical mechanism of
late-19th-century metal typewriters — no longer exist. But what does
exist, and has for well over a century, is the cultural expectation that
keyboards equal QWERTY.
So, do you take that fact into account when designing a solution to
this problem — or ignore it? There's no "right" answer, but the Fleksy
approach seems less likely to fail completely, because it doesn't seek
to shrug off all that cultural weight that QWERTY has. If the real
design problem being addressed is, "How can we make soft-key typing
faster?" then you might wonder, "what slows people down when typing on
soft keys?" Is it ergonomics or something mechanical — a feature of the
system? Or is it an
outcome of those ergonomics? What slows me
down when I type on a touchscreen isn't the lack of haptic feedback or
suboptimal key arrangement. What slows me down, really, is the
outcome of compensating for the limits of the system on glass screens — that is, my own
error-correcting behavior: I
have to stare at the keys to make sure I'm pressing the right ones,
move more slowly, or back up and correct what I mis-typed. So if this
manual error-correcting behavior is what is slowing me down in this
context, perhaps the solution is not to redesign the keyboard into a
wholly-unfamiliar-but-somehow-technically-optimized arrangement, and ask
me to learn it, even though this new learning will not apply to any
other manual text-input task I'll ever encounter — but simply let me
keep doing what I already know how to do, while
relieving me of that error-correcting burden. Keep the QWERTY — the cultural artifact I'm already an expert user of — but add software that
minimizes my error —so I don't have to slow down. This is what Fleksy aims to do.
Granted, KALQ's alternative layout is a logical reaction to the fact
that, when you try to solve the ergonomic problem (splitting the
keyboard into two pieces that live on either side of a device's screen,
easily accessible by your thumbs), some of QWERTY's advantages simply
break — so there was no choice but to rearrange the keys in order to
commit to that ergonomic solution. In light of Fleksy's approach,
though, I just wonder if that tradeoff is really worth it.
And Fleksy doesn't work perfectly yet either — not even close. But
that design approach somehow seems more human-friendly, in the larger
context of keyboard usage. It's to their credit that both Fleksy and
KALQ's creators have not simply conjectured from armchairs about what
would, could, or should work: they've put in an impressive amount of
research into identifying and implementing their respective solutions.
Still, that research — and the solutions it suggests — derives from
asking very different questions about what this typing problem really is.
Image via iStockphoto, Erikona
How to Fix the Typing-on-Touchscreens Problem via
mashable
