Academics Tout Touchscreen KALQ Keyboard As QWERTY Alternative

KALQ, a touchscreen keyboard app that promises to enable much faster typing on tablets and make embarrassing typos a thing of the past, has been unveiled by a group of researchers.

The team claims the standard QWERTY configuration is not suitable for two-thumb typing and users are limited to a rate of 20 words per minute – much slower than if they were using a physical keyboard.

Using computational optimisation techniques in conjunction with a model of thumb movement, the team, consisting of academics from at the University St Andrews, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Montana Tech, searched through millions of potential layouts before identifying one that provided superior performance.

QWERTY Woes

“The legacy of QWERTY has trapped users with suboptimal text entry interfaces on mobile devices,” said Dr Per Ola Kristensson, lecturer in Human Computer Interaction at the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.

“However, before abandoning QWERTY, users rightfully demand a compelling alternative. We believe KALQ provides a large enough performance improvement to incentivise users to switch and benefit from faster and more comfortable typing.”

Faster typing can be enabled by simply rearranging keys, but the team recognised this would not provide a significant improvement or reduce strain on the thumbs. The computational optimisation process aimed to minimise moving times of thumbs and make typing on alternating sides of the tablet as easy as possible.

With KALQ, all vowels, with the exception of y (which can be both a vowel and consonant), are placed in the right thumb area, whereas the left was assigned more keys. Participants in the user study were trained to move thumbs simultaneously so that when one thumb is approaching a letter, the other moves to the next target.

KALQ benefits

The researchers also implemented an error correction algorithm that enables users to type faster while retaining an acceptable error rate. Using KALQ, users are able to reach 37 words per minute, they claimed.

“The key to optimising a keyboard for two thumbs is to minimise long typing sequences that only involve a single thumb. It is also important to place frequently used letter keys centrally close to each other,” said Dr Antti Oulasvirta, senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany.

“Experienced typists move their thumbs simultaneously: while one thumb is selecting a particular key, the other thumb is approaching its next target. From these insights we derived a predictive behavioural model we could use to optimise the keyboard.”

The researchers will present their findings at the CHI 2013 Conference in May, while KALQ will be available as a free app for Android devices.

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