Establishing a baseline for text entry for a multi-touch virtual keyboard

Multi-touch, which has been heralded as a revolution in human–computer interaction, provides features such as gestural interaction, tangible interfaces, pen-based computing, and interface customization—features embraced by an increasingly tech-savvy public. However, multi-touch platforms have not been adopted as “everyday” computer interaction devices that support important text entry intensive applications such as word processing and spreadsheets. In this paper, we present two studies that begin to explore user performance and experience with entering text using a multi-touch input. The first study establishes a benchmark for text entry performance on a multi-touch platform across input modes that compare uppercase-only to mixed-case, single-touch to multi-touch and copy to memorization tasks. The second study includes mouse style interaction for formatting rich text to simulate a word processing task using multi-touch input. As expected, our results show that users do not perform as well in terms of text entry efficiency and speed using a multi-touch interface as with a traditional keyboard. Not as expected was the result that degradation in performance was significantly less for memorization versus copy tasks, and consequently willingness to use multi-touch was substantially higher (50% versus 26%) in the former case. Our results, which include preferred input styles of participants, also provide a baseline for further research to explore techniques for improving text entry performance on multi-touch systems.