Paper Reading #22: Usability Guided Key-Target Resizing for Soft Keyboards

Comments:
Comment 1 
Comment 2

Reference Information:
Title: Usability Guided Key-Target Resizing for Soft Keyboards
Authors: Asela Gunawardana, Tim Paek, Christopher Meek
Venue: IUI 

Summary:
In this paper, the authors discuss how to improve soft keyboards that are used in devices such as smartphones. The current problem is that because there is no haptic feedback, soft keyboards can often lead to a lot of keystroke errors. The authors discuss that by monitoring the usage of certain letters and expanding the area on the soft keyboard that responds to that key, errors can be minimized. The do note that a drawback to this is that if a certain key is used too often, the area marked for that key can extend too far into another keys area and make that key almost impossible to press. Therefore to combat this the authors place limits as to how far a key can extend. By doing this the authors have found that there are less errors than there are with the current system.

Discussion:
This is an interesting solution to a problem that I never really thought was all that big of a deal. It seems like while this will most likely lead to fewer errors overall, it makes it to where certain keys that are rarely used will be very erroneous. Even with the limits on key reduction the E shown above looks like it could easily be mistaken for an S, R, or W. It is also troubling that if you were a soft keyboard enthusiast who became very skilled at soft keyboard typing, your skills would be for naught when the keys dynamically change such as proposed here. I would be interested to see what letters I frequently use given that I am horrible and spelling and use a lot of abbreviations.