Usability evaluation for software keyboard on high-performance mobile devices

Abstract

Most of high-performance mobile devices called smartphone or slate computer which recently emerged uses general-purpose mobile operating system (Mobile OS) such as Android, iOS, Symbian OS, etc. These devices have two characteristics compared with previous mobile devices: 1) many of the devices have touchscreen as main user interface, hence users operate graphical user interfaces (GUIs) displayed on the screen directly by fingers or a pen and 2) different devices made by different companies have similar GUIs because the devices use the same mobile OS. Furthermore, usability evaluation and improvement for one of the mobile OS affects many devices which use same mobile OS, hence importance of the usability evaluation for mobile OS is more valuable than for previous mobile devices. In this paper, we evaluate how position of software keyboard on touchscreen affects usability of a mobile OS, Android. Software tool to record user operation history on software keyboard was developed for evaluation experience. In an experiment, three positions of software keyboard were tested. As a result, keyboard placed on top or middle of the display takes better error rate and subjective evaluation than the previous position, bottom of the display. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.