Triangular Buttons Make On-Screen Keyboards More Usable

As someone targeted for perpetual failure by the designers of most keyboards, I'm happy to read The Register's report that "A British inventor has submitted a patent application for a wacky touchscreen keyboard design which, he claims, could spell the end for accidental key presses."

Comments

The Best Thing To Do

[sycodon]

Is to get rid of the damned, usless, pain in the ass keycaps key.

As for the keyboard itself, seems I've seen that in some si-fi movie.

Re:The Best Thing To Do

[RemoWilliams84]

Why would you want sexually explicit words all over your screen all of the time?

Re:The Best Thing To Do

[Erikderzweite]

I use it for switching keyboard layouts. Much more convenient with Caps Lock than with Ctrl-Shift or Alt-Shift (damn you Windows for not allowing Caps Lock to toggle layouts!).

Re:The Best Thing To Do

[slinches]

Significantly more is right. It's about the same size as the buttons themselves, doubling screen real-estate.

From the picture, it looks like this could be done in the same screen area if the width and height of the triangular keys remained the same as their square counterparts. This would cause each key to be smaller in area though, so I'm not sure if it would be any better due to more frequent misses.

Re:The Best Thing To Do

[rtb61]

Of course the catch with using triangular shaped keys on a touch screen, is the dead space between keys is now far greater then the live space for the keys. So technically while you are far less likely to hit the wrong key you are also far more likely to hit dead space. So tapping the screen twice as often to get the same key strokes versus the occasional incorrect key stroke.

I bet I can guess which will annoy the users the most, they will tend to blame themselves for pressing the wrong key and blamer the device for missing the key. He should forget apple and go with M$, M$ are always good for pulling bonehead maneuvers.

Other innevitable innovations...

[RyanFenton]

Just add unique bumps/shapes to the edges of the triangles, and you don't have to look while texting either. It would be quite a bit better than rectangular buttons, because as you slide your thumb around, the triangular gaps would make the shapes rather easy to "read" by feel. There - now if anyone wants prior art on the inevitable patent dispute over this basic idea, this post is the prior art you can say you derived your product from. Ryan Fenton

Re:Other innevitable innovations...

[stubob]

Did you just invent braille?

Apple is, or should be, FAR ahead of this...

[jeffb (2.718)]

...based on the IP they acquired from FingerWorks. You can do really sophisticated error-correction if you're getting not only a stream of characters, but the exact location of the press, contact area, dwell time, and possibly more. So, with a virtual multi-touch keyboard, you can say "Okay, that looked like an R, but the contact was actually most of the way over toward E, and the previous two letters were T-H, so I'm going to go ahead and make it an E."

I know it'll rankle the manual-transmission crowd, but I've been using a FingerWorks keyboard for years, and most of the time, it's absolutely spooky how well the autocorrect works. (Just don't try high-intensity vi work.)

Klingon Keyboard?

[RandomChars]

This reminds me of the klingon displays from startrek

Training to make unaware mistakes?

[el_gato_borracho]

Does using such an auto-correcting keyboard make it harder to type correctly when you move to a "normal" keyboard? Something bothers me about devices that train me to make more unaware mistakes.

Re:Training to make unaware mistakes?

[jeffb (2.718)]

Does using such an auto-correcting keyboard make it harder to type correctly when you move to a "normal" keyboard? Something bothers me about devices that train me to make more unaware mistakes.

A little. But it's completely overwhelmed by the rich tactile feedback that you get from a physical keyboard. Without that tactile feedback, even the recovered-from-alien-spacecraft-level intelligence in the FingerWorks TouchStream keyboard only gets you up to about half the typing speed you see on a conventional keyboard; that, and the $300-400 price tag, made it a commercial failure.

But I'm much happier typing half as fast and having zero wrist pain. (No reaching for the mouse or modifier keys; they're both gestures, and don't even require you to move from the home position.)

When I do go back to a conventional keyboard, I sometimes make a few autocorrect-worthy mistakes in the first few minutes, but then I shift back into non-zero-force mode and they go away. My speed and accuracy on a conventional keyboard, while it's always been substandard, hasn't dropped since I've been using the TouchStream.

Re:make users adapt to hardware

[osu-neko]

It is easier to use; alas, it does the opposite of what you say. It doesn't train users to be more careful with their finger placements, it actually allows them to be less accurate. On a standard keyboard, if part of your finger strays outside the zone of the key you're trying to press, you end up also depressing the next key over too. On this keyboard, you do not. That's a boon for people who aren't so accurate with the placement of their fingers, but it'll make it harder for them to migrate to a standard, less-forgiving keyboard.

Re:make users adapt to hardware

[JaredOfEuropa]

in other words, this trains the user to be more careful with their finger placements. It isn't magic (like standard rollover logic in keyboards), it's behavioral modification.

Exactly, and it just might work. They recently pulled a similar bevavioral trick in my apartment's car park: instead of painting white lines to separate the car slots, they painted grey rectangles on each space, more or less the width of a car so that there's seemingly a lot more dead space between slots. The result? I notice that people park their cars much more neatly now, and it's now rare to find a car parked so close you can't open your door anymore, even though each car still has the same space as before.