Pickup Usability Dominates - Human-Computer Interaction and Innovation in Handheld, Mobile and Wearable Technologies - page 44

Figure 1. Dvorak keyboard

be very slow and, as with the Dvorak, rejected
by end users (and would still be sub-optimal for
one-thumb use!).
The half-QWERTY mobile keyboard (Matias,
MacKenzie, & Buxton, 1996) (fig 2-left) builds
on QWERTY skills and the imbalance between
left and right hands by halving the keyboard in
the centre. The keyboard has a standard left half
of a QWERTY keyboard, while the user holds the
space bar to flip the keyboard to give the right
side letters. Targeting smaller size and fast one-
handed entry, experiments have shown that users
of the half-QWERTY keyboard quickly achieved
consistent speeds of 30 words per minute or
higher (when using a keyboard with desktop-sized
keys). The FrogPad™ is a variant using an opti-
mised keyboard, so that use of the “right side” of
the keyboard is minimised (Figure 2). (Matias et
al., 1996) predicted an optimised pad would lead
to a speed increase of around 18% over the half-
qwerty design. FrogPad™ Inc now manufacture

an optimised keyboard along these lines and claim
40+ words per minute typing speeds.
Neither half-keyboards have yet to be inte-
grated into mobiles, while the FastTap™ keyboard,
however, has been targeted at mobile devices from
initial conception. This patented technology takes
a different approach to miniaturisation by includ-
ing an alphabetic keyboard as raised keys between
the standard numeric keys of a phone pad—giv-
ing direct non-ambiguous text entry on a very
small platform while preserving the standard 12-
key keypad currently used by over 90% of mobile
users globally (see figure 3). Experiments (Cock-
burn & Siresena, 2003) have shown that FastTap™
is considerably faster and easier to use for novice
users than more standard predictive text ap-
proaches and the two approaches perform simi-
larly for expert users (once practiced, FastTap
users in their trial achieved 9.3wpm with T9™
users achieving 10.8wpm—somewhat slower than
in other trials, see below for discussion of predic-
tive text and T9).

Figure 2. Simplified Half-QWERTY and FrogPad™