Shortcut Gestures for Mobile Text Editing on Fully Touch Sensitive Smartphones

Abstract

While advances in mobile text entry enable smartphone users to type almost as fast as on hardware keyboards, text-heavy activities are still not widely adopted. One reason is the lack of shortcut mechanisms. In this article, we determine shortcuts for text-heavy activities, elicit shortcut gestures, implement them for a fully touch-sensitive smartphone, and conduct an evaluation with potential users. We found that experts perform around 800 keyboard shortcuts per day, which are not available on smartphones. Interviews revealed the lack of shortcuts as a major limitation that prevents mobile text editing. Therefore, we elicited gestures for the 22 most important shortcuts for smartphones that are touch-sensitive on the whole device surface. We implemented the gestures for a fully touch-sensitive smartphone using deep learning and evaluated them in realistic scenarios to gather feedback. We show that the developed prototype is perceived as intuitive and faster than recent commercial approaches.