1 Copyright © 2011 Tata Consultancy Services Limited

Novel On-screen Keyboard for TV and Set-top boxISCE 14-17 June 2011, Singapore

Arpan PalInnovation Lab, TCS

Points to cover

• Problem Statement• Background of OSK Design• User Study and Results• Improvements based on User Study• Conclusions and Future Work

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Home Infotainment Platform

• File manager• Media Player Photo viewer Music player Video player• Internet Browser• PDF editor PDF viewer PDF creator• Calculator• Zip/ Unzip• Open office• E-Mail client• Chat client• Printer access• Games• Remote Upgrade• Provisioning• Authentication

• Viewing TV content• Blending of TV and Graphics• Web Browser• Audio Player• Video Player• Picture Viewer• Video Chat• SMS/ SMS on TV• Remote Upgrade• Provisioning• Authentication

GEN 1 Features GEN 2 Features

Low-cost Computing using Television as Display

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Problem statement

Typing on TV screen using a Set top Box (Home Infotainment Platform)

TV is viewed from a distance. – Difficult and cumbersome to type using a mouse or traditional

keyboard– Keyboard and mouse also increases overall cost of the system– Existing on-screen keyboards require user to go through many key

presses, making the typing process slow and cumbersome.

As a solution to these problems, a novel onscreen keyboard has been implemented to enable users type efficiently and correctly. It allows users to achieve the services with less effort and in less time.

– Customized for infra-red remote.

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Improved Layout for on-screen Keyboard

Design based on optimizing the number of keystrokes Allows faster typing through two-step hierarchical navigation and

selection mechanism for typing. Operated by the accompanying specially designed remote control. Navigation and selection is done using only 9 special navigation

keys (orange colored) of the remote.

Pal, A et. al., A novel on-screen keyboard for hierarchical navigation with reduced number of key strokes, IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) 2009.

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Typing mechanism

The on screen keyboard is operated by a remote control.– The Up, Down, Left and Right keys in the remote-control are used to

move across the key-blocks in vertical and horizontal direction. These are called Navigational keys

– The Up Left, Up right, Down left,

Down right are used to select a

particular character within the

block and are called selection keys.

– “Ok” key is used to select keys like

Space bar, WWW, .com etc.

Left

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Evaluation through user study

QWERTY vs. proposed keyboard– 25 users were asked to type a particular text using onscreen QWERTY

keyboard and the proposed novel layout.– Time taken to type was noted and measurements were done in terms

of CPM (characters/min).– The % improvement in CPM over onscreen QWERTY keyboard is

shown below in the graph.

Average % improvement– For email typing is 27% – For SMS typing is 41%– For URL typing is 41%

Text Phrase Source: MacKenzie and Soukoreff (2003)

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User Study (Contd…)

Users were also asked to get familiar with the layout through some practice and then same data were recorded.

There are some further improvements showing the proposed layout needs some learning time.

The improvement on an average was 31.8% for email, 29.9% SMS and 16.69% for URL typing as shown in the graph below.

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User perception study

A separate study was conducted on how the new keyboard was perceived by the users.

– 25 users were approached with the questioner given below and were requested to provide a rating on a scale of 1 to 5.o Questions asked:

• Does the keyboard provide enough assistance?• How is the ease of use of on-screen keyboard?

– To neutralize the effect of outliers the median (middle value of the rating) and mode (most frequently occurring rating) values were calculated.

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User perception study - results

– Users seemed OK with the assistance provided by the keyboard but there seems to be a scope of improvement in ease-of-use area.

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Design updates based on user study

Layout of alphabets - In initial release letters a,b,g,h were in the same block. Majority of the users pointed out that it would be better to have a,b,c,d in a block.

Most frequently used Smileys – Most frequently used smileys were updated to accommodate user preferences.

Inclusion of “@” on first screen - based on user feedback. Hot keys to speed up typing – 4 colored keys were designed to be

hot keys. Green for typing “space”, red for typing “delete”, yellow and blue to bring up capital/small letter screen and symbol screen.

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Design Updates (Contd….)

Visual effect of key press – During typing user should get some visual indication on the character itself. The selected character is momentarily highlighted and then typed.

Introduction of co-located help – a brief pictorial help was embedded along with OSK informing users about how to use it. With this the time required for typing was reduced by 13% on an average as shown below.

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Conclusion and Future work

Conclusion– Small text typing (URL, SMS) seems to be OK with users– Long text typing (like email) and ease-of-use still an area of concern– Improvement in layout, GUI and help based on user feedback

Future scope of work– Predictive search can be integrated with OSK to give a better user

experience and fast text entry – T9 like text entry using infra-red remote– Multilingual support for OSK

Thank you

arpan.pal@tcs.com

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References:

[1] World Internet Usage Statistics News and World Population Stats.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

[2] ITU report baffled over RP’s high mobile phone,TV penetration. http://technews.com.ph/?p=1627

[3] Pal, A., Bhaumik, C., Kar, D., Ghoshdastidar, S.,Shukla, J., A novel on-screen keyboard for hierarchical navigation with reduced number of key strokes,

IEEE International Conference on Systems,Man and Cybernetics, 2009. SMC 2009.

[4] Anirudha Joshi , Ashish Ganu , Aditya Chand , Vikram Parmar , Gaurav Mathur, Keylekh: a keyboard for text entry in indic scripts, CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 24-29,2004, Vienna, Austria

[5] William Cooper, The interactive television user experience so far, Proceeding of the 1st international conference on Designing interactive user experiences for TV and video, October 22-24, 2008, Silicon Valley, California, USA

[6] Arpan Pal, Chirabrata Bhaumik, M Prashant, Avik Ghose, Home Infotainment Platform, International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Multimedia Applications (UCMA2010), Miyazaki, Japan, July 2010

[7] Geleijnse, G., Aliakseyeu, D., and Sarroukh, E. 2009. Comparing text entry methods for interactive television applications.Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on European interactive Television Conference (Leuven, Belgium, June 03 - 05, 2009). EuroITV '09. ACM, New York, NY, 145-148

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References (Contd….)

[8] Tinwala, H., & MacKenzie, I. S. (2010). Eyes-free text entry with error correction on touchscreen mobile devices. Proceedings of the Sixth Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction - NordiCHI 2010, 511-520. New York: ACM.

[9] Iatrino and S. Modeo. Text editing in digital terrestrial television: a comparison of three interfaces. In Proceedings of EuroITV'06, Athens, Greece,2006

[10] Ingmarsson, M., Dinka, D., Zhai, S., TNT-A numeric keypad based text input method, Proc. CHI 2004: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Vienna, Austria. CHI Letters 6(1), 639-646, ACM Press.

[11] Költringer, T., Isokoski, P., and Grechenig, T. 2007. TwoStick:writing with a game controller. In Proceedings of Graphics interface 2007 (Montreal, Canada, May 28 - 30, 2007). GI '07, vol. 234. ACM, New York, NY, 103-110. DOI=

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1268517.1268536

[12] Wobbrock, J.O. and Myers, B.A. (2006). Analyzing the input stream for character-level errors in unconstrained text entry evaluations. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 13 (4), pp. 458-489.