The design and evaluation of a gestural keyboard for entering programming code on mobile devices

We present the design and the evaluation of a soft keyboard aimed at facilitating the input of programming code on mobile devices equipped with touch screens, such as tablets and smartphones. Besides the traditional tap on a key interaction, the keyboard allows the user to draw gestures on top of it. The gestures correspond to shortcuts to enter programming statements/constructs or to activate specific keyboard sub-layouts. The keyboard was compared in a user study to a traditional soft keyboard with a QWERTY layout and to another state-of-art keyboard designed for programming. The results show a significant advantage for our design in terms of speed and gesture per characters.