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Gestures and widgets: performance in text editing on multi-touch capable mobile devices

Published: 27 April 2013 Publication History

Abstract

We describe the design and evaluation of a gestural text editing technique for touchscreen devices. The gestures are drawn on top of the soft keyboard and interpreted as commands for moving the caret, performing selections, and controlling the clipboard. Our implementation is an Android service that can be used in any text editing task on Android-based devices. We conducted an experiment to compare the gestural editing technique against the widget-based technique available on a smartphone (Samsung Galaxy II with Android 2.3.5). The results show a performance benefit of 13-24% for the gestural technique depending on the font size. Subjective feedback from the participants was also positive. Because the two editing techniques use different input areas, they can co-exist on a device. This means that the gestural editing can be added on any soft keyboard without interfering with user experience for those users that choose not to use it.

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  • (2024)SwivelTouch: Boosting Touchscreen Input with 3D Finger Rotation GestureProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36595848:2(1-30)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
  • (2024)TouchEditorProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36314547:4(1-29)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2024
  • (2023)GeShort: One-Handed Mobile Text Editing and Formatting with Gestural Shortcuts and a Floating ClipboardProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36042597:MHCI(1-23)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2013
    3550 pages
    ISBN:9781450318990
    DOI:10.1145/2470654
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 27 April 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. android
    2. caret movement
    3. clipboard
    4. gestures
    5. text editing

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)SwivelTouch: Boosting Touchscreen Input with 3D Finger Rotation GestureProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36595848:2(1-30)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
    • (2024)TouchEditorProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36314547:4(1-29)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2024
    • (2023)GeShort: One-Handed Mobile Text Editing and Formatting with Gestural Shortcuts and a Floating ClipboardProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36042597:MHCI(1-23)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
    • (2023)Arrow2edit: A Technique for Editing Text on SmartphonesHuman-Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-35596-7_27(416-432)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
    • (2022)EyeSayCorrect: Eye Gaze and Voice Based Hands-free Text Correction for Mobile DevicesProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3490099.3511103(470-482)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2022
    • (2022)A technique to improve text editing on smartphones2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC53370.2022.9833120(1-3)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2022
    • (2022)Towards More Direct Text Editing With Handwriting InterfacesInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2022.204189339:1(233-248)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2022
    • (2021)Voice and Touch Based Error-tolerant Multimodal Text Editing and Correction for SmartphonesThe 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3472749.3474742(162-178)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2021
    • (2021)Press-n-Paste: Copy-and-Paste Operations with Pressure-sensitive Caret Navigation for Miniaturized Surface in Mobile Augmented RealityProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34571465:EICS(1-29)Online publication date: 29-May-2021
    • (2021)AI-Driven Intelligent Text Correction Techniques for Mobile Text EntryArtificial Intelligence for Human Computer Interaction: A Modern Approach10.1007/978-3-030-82681-9_5(131-168)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2021
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