An Analysis of Novice Text Entry Performance on Large Interactive Wall Surfaces

This paper presents a comparative study of several soft keyboard layouts for text entry on interactive whiteboards. We compare the traditional QWERTY with several other layouts, including theoretically optimal ones, such as FITALY. In contrast to previous work, we concentrate on novice performance, as few people ever gain expert status on whiteboards. The results show that for a population of regular keyboard users, QWERTY is the best alternative and even the slightest deviations from that arrangement degrade the performance significantly. Based on the experiments, we present an in-depth analysis of the behaviour of users for several layouts from a cognitive viewpoint.