The Tap and Slide Keyboard: A New Interaction Method for Mobile Device Text Entry

This article introduces a new soft keyboard, named Tap and Slide, specifically designed for mobile devices. The new interaction method, on which the keyboard is based, allows performing text entry operations in a very small space, so minimizing the space required. To evaluate the keyboard from a usability point of view, three studies were performed: the first verifies whether the subjects’ abilities expressed in terms of technological knowledge may specifically provide advantages in performing text entry operations, the second tries to understand the ease of learning of the keyboard considering both accuracy and efficiency in task execution, and the third analyzes the performance of the soft keyboard in comparison with the more common QWERTY soft keyboard.