Designing a Simplified User Interface System for Smartphone Natives to Facilitate PC Operations

Abstract

A novel simplified interface system for smartphone natives, which allows users to operate a PC through their own smartphones, is proposed. Smartphones have overtaken PCs and are currently the most familiar devices for interacting with the world. We refers to those who grew up with such devices as “smartphone natives.” Although they are quite adept at using such devices, they have little PC experience and limited operation skills. According to an interview with expert users, including university students and staff in the computer science department, we identified 55 effective shortcut keys that they use regularly and that once mastered will speed up the use of Windows OS and MS Word. The proposed interface system has the soft keys corresponding to these shortcuts, each of which is laid out on the smartphone screen according to its importance by applying a kind of heat map, the thumb zone, representing the comfortable area on a smartphone screen for touch with one-handed use. We have conducted a user study of smartphone natives, each of which is a novice user of a PC, and revealed the effectiveness of the proposed system in text entry and a future research direction to further investigate the effect of our system when operating a PC without the use of a keyboard/mouse.