Optimised Virtual Keyboards with and without Alphabetical Ordering - A Novice User Study

Optimised virtual keyboards are potentially efficient and fast for expert users, but they are difficult and slow for novice users due to the visual search requirement. Introducing structure and order to the layout may ease the visual searching process. By means of a Metropolis algorithm with an added alphabetical bias term to the Fitts-digraph energy function previously used (Zhai, Hunter, & Smith, 2000), we designed a keyboard layout with alphabetical ordering tendency with little movement efficiency cost. In contrast to previous efforts that failed to find any alphabetical ordering advantage, our experiment demonstrated that the alphabetical ordering created by our design method indeed improves novice users’ performance and was preferred by most participants.