Mobile Text Input with Soft Keyboards: Optimization by Means of Visual Clues

Soft keyboards are one of the most popular methods to input text for mobile pen-based computing. They allow text input to be performed through an onscreen graphical representation of a standard desk keyboard. Besides standard QWERTY keyboard layout, some researchers have proposed optimized alternative key organizations to improve user performances with soft keyboards. In this paper we propose and evaluate a solution using visual clues to facilitate the acceptance of these optimized layouts by novices.