Experiment with a triangular QETUO keyboard

For the thousandth time sealed, typing text from a mobile phone, I wondered how you can change the on-screen keyboard in such a way as to reduce the number of such unpleasant moments. The idea came somehow by itself. I do not think that it is unique, but Google did not tell me about analogues. So this article was born.

In theory

When typing, the user most likely aims at the center of the displayed button (the centroid of the geometric figure). Thus, if the button has a rectangular shape, then the probability of a miss is directly proportional to half the length of its shorter side. For simplicity, I consider two buttons that total square components.


Schematic image of buttons of different shapes
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The picture reveals the secret of my approach. I decided to use an alternative button shape, namely a triangle. To compare the possibility of a miss - you need to compare the minimum distances from centroids to the sides in a rectangle and a triangle. In the rectangle it will be equal to a quarter of the side of the square, and in the triangle - to the side of the square multiplied by the root of three, and divided by three. It is not difficult to understand that the minimum distance from the centroid to the side in a rectangle is less than in a triangle. In theory, we get an increase in accuracy when changing the shape of a button to a triangular one. But I would like to check it in practice.

On practice

Literally half an hour on my knee, I assembled an application with a triangular qetuo-keyboard using Apache Cordova. The application itself compiled for Android can be downloaded from the link . And so it looks like:

Triangles on a nerve conservation rescue operation

Having distributed it to 10 of my friends, the lucky owners of android backgrounds, I started testing. Its essence was to write the phrase “hello world. i am tester. "using a triangular and standard android keyboards. The results surprised me. When using a standard keyboard, a person was sealed every second time, while using a triangular one, only every fifth person was used.

Instead of conclusion

I must say that testing is not too honest. It would be more correct to write an application with a rectangular keyboard, the buttons in which occupy exactly the same area, but unfortunately I didn’t have time to draw a rectangular version. So you can safely consider the results of fraud. Nevertheless, I am going to embed this type of keyboard into my next applications and check the data accuracy through AB testing. If you like the idea, you can do anything with it, I will be only happy.

Thank you all for your attention.

Link to application sources - link
Link to .apk file - link
The prototype does not claim to use it as a real alternative to the built-in keyboard.

Article is devoted to the person who convinced me to write on Habr still - Lena Savkina.