Flickey: Flick-based QWERTY software keyboard for ultra-small touch screen devices

Abstract

Ultra-small touch screen devices (e.g., smartwatches) are required to be small and lightweight so that they can be worn on the body with no frustration. For this reason, users often have difficulties in selecting the correct keys, and thus entering texts. Therefore, entering texts on ultra-small touch screen devices is impractical. To address this problem, we present Flickey, a flick-based QWERTY software keyboard for ultra-small touch screen devices. The flick-based selection mechanism of Flickey, in combination with its callout technique, allows users to select a tiny key on the small keyboard more easily than with a tap. To investigate the performance and usability of Flickey, we developed a prototype of Flickey and conducted a comparative experiment with two existing keyboards. The results suggest that Flickey shows high performance when the size of the keyboard becomes small.