Analysis of text entry performance metrics

Abstract

Researchers have proposed many text entry systems to enable users to perform this frequent task as quickly and precise as possible. Unfortunately the reported data varies widely and it is difficult to extract meaningful average entry speeds and error rates from this body of work. In this article we collect data from well-designed and well-reported experiments for the most important text entry methods, including those for handheld devices. Our survey results show that thumb keyboard is the fastest text entry method after the standard QWERTY keyboard, and that Twiddler is fastest amongst non-QWERTY methods. Moreover, we survey how text entry errors were handled in these studies. Finally, we conducted a user study to detect which effect different error-handling methodologies have on text entry performance metrics. Our study results show that the way human errors are handled has indeed a significant effect on all frequently used error metrics.