Author: Mingrui “Ray” Zhang

purpose

This paper establishes text-entry throughput as a single unified measure of input efficiency due to its stability across different speed-accuracy biases

subjects and sites

  • Between-subjects
  • 27 participants
  • 15 laptop keyboard
  • 12 smartphone keyboard
  • Experienced typists aged 22–27

methods and theory

  1. Calculate source information
  2. Calculate transmission probabilities
  3. Calculate throughput

terms and themes

  • Speed-accuracy bias: subjective and internal, can change with context, affects performance
  • Shannon’s information theory
  • Presented string (P)
  • Transcribed string (T)

questions

  • “How can we draw firm performance conclusions in the presence of [speed-accuracy] tradeoffs?” (1)
  • How do we “reconcile speed with uncorrected errors?” (1)
  • “Can we successfully manipulate different speed-accuracy biases for participants during text entry?” (7)
  • “How stable is our new throughput metric across different participant speed-accuracy biases?” (7)
  • “How does throughput stability compare to that of established speed and error rate metrics?” (7)

notes

“there was no significant increase in throughput using auto-correction, word completion, and word prediction” (12) “Our hope is that throughput will be calculated and reported to support comparisons across devices, text entry methods, and participants” (12)

  • Speed and accuracy should also be reported due to their practical insight