Modern Touchscreen Keyboards as Intelligent User Interfaces: A Research Review

Abstract

Essential to mobile communication, the touchscreen keyboard is the most ubiquitous intelligent user interface on modern mobile phones. Developing smarter, more efficient, easy to learn, and fun to use keyboards has presented many fascinating IUI research and design questions. Some have been addressed by academic research and practitioners in industry, while others remain significant ongoing research challenges. In this IUI 2017 keynote address I will review and synthesize the progress and open research questions of the past 15 years in text input, focusing on those my co-authors and I have directly dealt with through publications, such as the cost-benefit equations of automation and prediction [9], the power of machine/statistical intelligence [4, 7, 12], the human performance models fundamental to the design of error-correction algorithms [1, 2, 8], spatial scaling from a phone to a watch and the implications on human-machine labor division [5], user behavior and learning innovation [7, 11, 12, 13], and the challenges of evaluating the longitudinal effects of personalization and adaptation [4]. Through this research program review, I will illustrate why intelligent user interfaces, or the combination of machine intelligence and human factors, holds the future of human-computer interaction, and information technology at large.