Alternative Screen Keyboard Project

One of the most important tasks facing mobile device developers is to create the most user-friendly interface. Including information input method. If we talk about text messaging, then today nothing better than a mechanical or virtual keyboard has been invented. With the transition from push-button mobile phones to smartphones, typing has become easier and faster, since the QWERTY-keyboard is much more convenient for this. But still it is not an ideal tool for smartphones: diagonal displays do not allow placing a comfortable-sized keyboard. Yes, and the layout of letters on the QWERTY-keyboard has long been criticized as obsolete . In this regard, many developers continue to experiment with keyboards for mobile devices. And their search became even more intense due to the rapid development of wearable gadgets.

During the creation of the YotaPhone, it turned out that the display on electronic ink is less convenient for a virtual keyboard compared to the LCD. Thanks to careful elaboration of the interface, we managed to minimize this difference. But we did not stop tracking various innovations in the field of text input. And today we want to propose one very interesting idea of ​​an on-screen keyboard for discussion. In order not to retell in our own words, we have prepared for you a translation of the original source article.

5-Tiles

Meet the 5-Tile Keyboard , another contender for replacing QWERTY. We believe that his chances of success are especially great in the case of small wearable devices like smart watches. The main reason for creating a project was the size of the QWERTY keyboard that was too small compared to a person’s fingers.
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Attempts to "overthrow" QWERTY can be compared with the passing of tests of Yahweh in the movie "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." Let this one be littered with the skeletons of all sorts of alternative keyboard projects that have failed. However, this does not keep regular applicants from new hopeless attempts. Well, they are not hopeless literally , but they have a miserable chance to change ingrained QWERTY habits in the short term.

Constant failures of alternative projects are due to the fact that they are trying to change our muscle memory with an almost 150-year history. And despite the fact that QWERTY appeared as an attempt to solve a constructive lack of typewriters, it firmly rooted in the minds of countless users at the level of reflexes. However, the imperfection of QWERTY makes all the new brave ones try to replace it. It was once optimized for speeding up the printing mechanism, and not for user comfort. And today, this anachronism also takes up a lot of space on the screens of our smartphones.

It is the development of touch displays that opened up new opportunities for abandoning QWERTY. After all, it is much easier to offer users to try a new virtual keyboard than to remake billions of metal and plastic keyboards. Well, at least on Android devices, since Apple is a strong supporter of QWERTY saving.

A start-up, whose project will surpass it and become a new standard, will undoubtedly gain immortality, like Indiana Jones and his father, who sipped from the Holy Grail.

Five buttons

Let's go back to 5-Tiles . This is an alternative type of typing for touch screens, which abandoned the traditional alphabetic buttons. But this is not important. The highlight of the project is the use of only five buttons, as well as the selection of characters using taps and gestures.



Placing all the buttons with letters on the screen at once is especially problematic in the case of smart watches and other compact wearable electronics. A set of gestures can be used even in Google Glass.



The authors of the project believe that its main advantage, in addition to saving screen space, is a large number of combinations with only five buttons.

This is not the only alternative keyboard design for small screens. Canadian startup Minuum offers the option where the entire QWERTY keyboard is crammed into the bottom of the screen. To select characters, gestures are used and an automatic algorithm is built in, suggesting different words depending on the context.

But still, Minuum relies on the use of QWERTY, while 5-Tiles implies not just learning a large number of gestures, but requires a review of the entire typing process. If you do not take into account the learning curve, then 5-Tiles offers an elegant solution to the problem of small screens, even providing the ability to copy and paste with gestures. But at the same time, the main and huge obstacle is the need to convince users to adopt a completely new way of typing.

Field trials

Does 5-Tiles work the same way? The letters of the Latin alphabet are divided into five buttons of the keyboard (on the last 4 letters and a space). On each button, the most frequently used letter is marked with an underscore. This means that pressing the button once will print this letter. For the rest, you need to use the swipe gesture to the left or to the right, depending on the location of the desired letter with respect to underlined.

Consider this on the example of the first button. If you simply click on it, the letter “ e ” will be printed. To print the letter " a " you need to press and, without releasing, drag your finger to the right until the next button. Accordingly, if you touch the third button, the letter “ b ” is printed, and so on up to “ d ”.

Most of the buttons using the swipe down or up perform additional functions. For example, svayp down on the first button deletes the last typed word, and svayp up - the last letter. There are gestures for the functions Shift, Enter, cursor keys and so on.

We would like to emphasize once again that using this keyboard implies learning a large number of gestures. This task is not for five seconds, minutes or even hours. It will take much longer to break away from QWERTY and start dialing 5-Tiles fast enough to not feel any discomfort. Of course, if we are talking about using it in a smartphone.

Unaccustomed to typing in 5-Tiles was tiring. It was necessary to search for each letter, and a set of additional characters, - the same hyphen, - required rather painstaking actions with buttons.



However, for smart watches, the question of dialing speed is undoubtedly much less acute. There, anyway, no one will train in the epistolary genre. A very short text will be typed on a smart watch, so learning how to work with 5-Tiles will require less time and effort.

The closest analogue to 5-Tiles is a good old-fashioned set using a 9-button numeric keypad. Remember how you had to repeatedly press the buttons on mobile phones to select the desired letter? In this case, many users have adapted quickly enough to type texts, despite the obvious inconvenience of the method. When it is very necessary, you get used to it and not to this.

Now for 5-Tiles it is important that wearable electronics (and smart watches in particular) are widely used. This will allow them to more successfully promote their alternative keyboard, which in any case will be a serious challenge for them.

Original article .

Our opinion

This project seemed very interesting to us. Yes, he has a weakness - the need to remember many different gestures. But even among QWERTY users, there are not many who own a “blind” set. What would it be like for a person who has used 5-Tiles all his life to suddenly sit in front of a bunch of buttons with letters arranged without any visible logic? See how long and painfully people on QWERTY are looking for the right buttons, people who are not used to high-tech and computers. So the opinion of the authors of the article on the excessive complexity of mastering 5-Tiles may be somewhat exaggerated.

We also asked to comment on this project, Anton Tarasenko, head of software development at Yota Devices:

Today there is no definitive answer to the question whether it is necessary to do different ways of entering text on different displays. Each solution has its pros and cons. QWERTY - familiar and understandable in combination with too small buttons and inefficient use of the display area. The main advantages of 5-Tiles are high input speed and compactness. About the shortcomings of the project described in detail above.

However, all alternative keyboard projects are somehow aimed at increasing the input speed. This means that the user needs to perform more actions per unit of time. We set ourselves the task of simplifying interaction with the smartphone.

In any case, the last word remains for users. What do you think about the 5-Tiles keyboard described? Would you personally be comfortable using it? I would like to be able to switch to it from QWERTY, for example?