Barton A. Smith

The metropolis keyboard - an exploration of quantitative techniques for virtual keyboard design

Text entry user interfaces have been a bottleneck of non traditional computing devices. One of the promising methods is the virtual keyboard on touch screens. Various layouts have been manually designed to replace the dominant QWERTY layout. This paper presents two computerized quantitative design techniques to search for the optimal virtual keyboard. The first technique simulated the dynamics of a keyboard with “digraph springs” between keys, which produced a “Hooke’s” keyboard with 41.6 wpm performance. The second technique used a Metropolis random walk algorithm guided by a “Fitts energy” objective function, which produced a “Metropolis” keyboard with 43.1 wpm performance. The paper also models and evaluates the perfo rmance of four existing keyboard layouts. We corrected erroneous estimates in the literature and predicted the performance of QWERTY, CHUBON, FITALY, OPTI to be in the neighborhood of 30, 33, 36 and 38 wpm respectively. Our best design was 40% faster than QWERTY and 10% faster than OPTI, illustrating the advantage of quantitative user interface design techniques based on models of human performance over traditional trial and error designs guided by heuristics.

Improving Browsing Performance: A study of four input devices for scrolling and pointing tasks

Navigating through online documents has become an increasingly common HCI task. This paper investigates alternative methods to improve user performance for browsing World Wide Web and other documents. In a task that involved both scrolling and pointing, we compared three input methods against the status-quo. The results showed that a mouse with a fmger wheel did not improve user’s performance; two other methods, namely a mouse with an isometric rate-control joystick operated by the same hand and a two handed system that put a mouse on the dominant hand and a joystick on the other, both significantly improved users’ performance. A human factors analysis on each of the three input methods is also presented.

Re‐evaluation of the thermal stability of optically nonlinear polymeric guest‐host systems

Guest‐host polymer systems with potential use in electro‐optic devices are discussed. The polymer host is a polyimide and the guest chromophores are 2,4,5‐triarylimidazoles (lophines). Poling stabilities have been obtained by extrapolating the second harmonic generation decay using a stretched exponential function and extrapolated lifetimes greater than a year at 80 °C have been obtained. In addition, an apparent relationship between the stability of poled order and the glass transition temperature is discussed.

Large anisotropy in optical properties of thin polyimide films of poly( p‐phenylene biphenyltetracarboximide)

Thin films ranging from 400 nm to 4 μm thickness of poly( p‐phenylene biphenyltetracarboximide) (BPDA‐PDA), prepared by thermal imidization of the precursor poly(amic acid) on substrates, have been investigated by the optical waveguide spectroscopy. These polyimide films, most prominent for potential applications as the interlevel dielectrics in multilevel interconnect technologies owing to their low coefficients of thermal expansion and excellent thermal/mechanical properties, are found to exhibit an extraordinarily large anisotropy in the refractive index, with the measured in‐plane refractive index n∥≂1.852 and the out‐of‐plane value n⊥≂1.612 at 632.8 nm wavelength, nearly independent of the film thickness. This large optical anisotropy indicates a very strong preference of polymer chains to orient along the film surface, and suggests a considerably larger (by ca. 27%) dielectric constant in the film plane than that along the film thickness. Moreover, there is some evidence for the existence of a very ...

In search of effective text input interfaces for off the desktop computing

It is generally recognized that todays frontier of HCI research lies beyond the traditional desktop computers whose GUI interfaces were built on the foundation of display—pointing device—full keyboard. Many interface challenges arise without such a physical UI foundation. Text writing—ranging from entering URLs and search queries, filling forms, typing commands, to taking notes and writing emails and chat messages—is one of the hard problems awaiting for solutions in off-desktop computing. This paper summarizes and synthesizes a research program on this topic at the IBM Almaden Research Center. It analyzes various dimensions that constitute a good text input interface; briefly reviews related literature; discusses the evaluation methodology issues of text input; presents the major ideas and results of two systems, ATOMIK and SHARK; and points out current and future directions in the area from our current vantage point.

Hand eye coordination patterns in target selection

In this paper, we describe the use of eye gaze tracking and trajectory analysis in the testing of the performance of input devices for cursor control in Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). By closely studying the behavior of test subjects performing pointing tasks, we can gain a more detailed understanding of the device design factors that may influence the overall performance with these devices. Our Results show them are many patterns of hand eye coordination at the computer interface which differ from patterns found in direct hand pointing at physical targets (Byrne, Anderson, Douglass, & Matessa, 1999).

Multilingual Touchscreen Keyboard Design and Optimization

A keyboard design, once adopted, tends to have a longlasting and worldwide impact on daily user experience. There is a substantial body of research on touch-screen stylus keyboard optimization. Most of it has focused on English only. Applying rigorous mathematical optimization methods and addressing diacritic character design issues, this article expands this body of work to French, Spanish, German, and Chinese. More important and counter to the intuition that optimization by nature is necessarily specific to each language, this article demonstrates that it is possible to find common layouts that are highly optimized across multiple languages for stylus (or single finger) typing. We first obtained a layout that is highly optimized for both English and French input. We then obtained a layout that is optimized for English, French, Spanish, German, and Chinese pinyin simultaneously, reducing its stylus travel distance to about half of QWERTYs for all of the five languages. In comparison to QWERTYs 3.31, 3.51, 3.7, 3.26, and 3.85 keys of movement for English, French, Spanish, German, and Chinese, respectively, the optimized multilingual layout has an average travel distance of 1.88, 1.86, 1.91, 1.77, and 1.68 keys, correspondingly. Applying Fittss law with parameters validated by a word tapping experiment, we show that these multilingual keyboards also significantly reduce text input time for multiple languages over the standard QWERTY for experienced users. In comparison to layouts individually optimized for each language, which are also obtained in this article, simultaneously optimizing for multiple languages caused only a minor performance degradation for each language. This surprising result could help to reduce the burden of multilingual users having to switch and learn new layouts for different languages. In addition, we also present and analyze multiple ways of incorporating diacritic characters on multilingual keyboards. Taken together, the present work provides a quantitative foundation for the understanding and designing of multilingual touch-screen keyboards.

In Search of the ‘Magic Carpet’: Design and Experimentation of a Bimanual 3D Navigation Interface

Abstract Hardware and software advances are making real-time 3D graphics part of all mainstream computers. World Wide Web sites encoded in Virtual Reality Modeling Language or other formats allow users across the Internet to share virtual 3D ‘worlds’. As the supporting software and hardware become increasingly powerful, the usability of the current 3D navigation interfaces becomes the limiting factor to the wide-spread application of 3D technologies. In this paper, we analyze the human factors issues in designing a usable navigation interface, including interface metaphor, integration and separation of multiple degrees of freedom, mode switching, isotonic versus isometric control, seamless merger of the 3D navigation devices with the GUI pointing and scrolling devices, and two-handed input. We propose a dual joystick navigation interface design based on a real-world metaphor (bulldozer), and present an experimental evaluation. The results show that the proposed bulldozer interface outperformed the status quo mouse-mapping interface in maze travelling and free flying tasks by 25–50%. Limitations of and possible future improvements to the bulldozer interface are also presented.

Electro-optic effects in two tolane side-chain nonlinear-optical polymers: comparison between measured coefficients and second-harmonic generation

The electro-optic coefficients for the chromophore nitroamino tolane [NAT:HOCH2CH2-N(C2H5)-ϕ-C≡ C-ϕ-NO2] attached to either a poly(methyl methacrylate) or an epoxy polymer have been measured by three different techniques: attenuated total reflection, ellipsometric reflection, and Mach–Zehnder interferometry. All the results for r33 and r13 were consistent and in agreement. A comparison of these experimental methods is given. The ratios between the electro-optic coefficients and the relationships between the coefficients and the second-harmonic components give additional information about these nonlinear-optical polymers. Interestingly, it was found that the observed electro-optic coefficients increased after the samples had aged a few months.

Community insights: helping community leaders enhance the value of enterprise online communities

Online communities are increasingly being deployed in enterprises to increase productivity and share expertise. Community leaders are critical for fostering successful communities, but existing technologies rarely support leaders directly, both because of a lack of clear data about leader needs, and because existing tools are member- rather than leader-centric. We present the evidence-based design and evaluation of a novel tool for community leaders, Community Insights (CI). CI provides actionable analytics that help community leaders foster healthy communities, providing value to both members and the organization. We describe empirical and system contributions derived from a long-term deployment of CI to leaders of 470 communities over 10 months. Empirical contributions include new data showing: (a) which metrics are most useful for leaders to assess community health, (b) the need for and how to design actionable metrics, (c) the need for and how to design contextualized analytics to support sensemaking about community data. These findings motivate a novel community system that provides leaders with useful, actionable and contextualized analytics.