BezelCopy: an efficient cross-application copy-paste technique for touchscreen smartphones

Copy-Paste (CP) operations on touchscreen smartphones are not as easy to perform as compared with similar operations on desktop computers. The smaller screen size and input area make both text selection and application switching more difficult to perform. To enable faster copy-paste on touchscreen smartphones, we introduce BezelCopy, a copy-paste technique that uses a bezel-swipe gesture to determine a rough area of interest in the document. Chosen text is magnified in a new panel to enable fast and precise selection. With the new panel, users can perform easy tap-and-drag gestures to select the exact content, and tap the application icon on the bottom of the panel to paste it to the target application. Users can further adjust the location of the pasted text in the target application using drag and drop. We conducted two experiments to compare the performance of BezelCopy with alternative approaches, and our results show that BezelCopy outperform existing copy-paste techniques for a number of commonly performed copy-paste tasks.

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