Typing on a touch surface: Effect of feedback with horizontal touch keyboard and vertical display setup

Multi-touch touchpads and touchscreens have begun replacing traditional keyboard in certain laptops. Taking advantage of the flexibility of a touchscreen, these designs are expected to enable a more efficient use of the limited real estate of a laptop computer. However, a serious problem remains in that the soft keyboard on a touch screen does not always satisfy users owing to a lack of tactile cues, which is essential for text entry, particularly text entry without looking at the keyboard. We investigated ways to overcome this problem by adding various types of feedback to a touchscreen and evaluated their effectiveness through a controlled user test.