Finding a Holistic Design for Elderly People to Type on Smartphones

Abstract

The small size of keyboard and keys makes typing difficult on smartphones. Fast and accurate text entry is highly desired by elderly smartphone users. However, human factors heavily affect their experience of typing on a miniature surface. More and more applications require additional and precise typing while ambiguity arises when the 62-character alphanumeric scheme is mapped to a smartphone keyboard with fewer keys, leading to ambiguity. In this paper, we propose a novel text entry approach called PluralTap that breaks up a traditional smartphone keyboard layout and allows concurrent key tapping on different surfaces. By discretely displacing input elements PluralTap improves the speed and accuracy of text entry, enabling elderly users with more finger engagement and less finger movement. Results from our pilot study reveal that PluralTap is a more efficient approach for text entry than using existing key layouts.