Category Archives: game

Large-scale analysis of mobile text entry

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There will be one billion smartphone users in 2013 and most of them will need some sort of text entry. To help people to enter text on mobile devices we aimed at studying how people type with a large number of participants. Therefore, we developed a typing game that records how users touch on the standard Android keyboard to investigate users’ typing behaviour. We published the typing game Type It! on the Android Market. The game got installed by 72,945 players and enabled us to collect 47,770,625 keystrokes from around the world.

Using the data we identified three approaches to improve text entry on mobile phones. As we found a systematic skew in users’ touch distribution we derived a function that compensates this skew by shifting touch events. In addition, we changed the keys’ labels by shifting them upwards and visualize the position where users touch the keyboard. By updating the game we conducted an experiment that investigates the effect of the three approaches. Results based on 6,603,659 further keystrokes and 13,013 installations show that visualizing the touched positions using a simple dot decreases the error rate of the Android keyboard by 18.3% but also decreases the speed by 5.2% with no positive effect on learnability. The Android keyboard outperforms the control condition but the constructed shift function further improves the performance by 2.2% and decreases the error rate by 9.1%. We argue that the shift function can improve existing keyboards at no costs.

Our paper with the lengthy title ‘Observational and Experimental Investigation of Typing Behaviour using Virtual Keyboards on Mobile Devices‘ that describes our work has recently been accepted at CHI 2012.

Type It! – an Android game that challenge your texting abilities

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Type It! is a game for the Android platform that is all about speed and quick fingers. It challenges (and hopefully improves) your texting abilities. You have to touch and type as fast as you can to see if you can beat all levels. The player’s task is to enter the words that appear as fast as possible. The faster they are the more points they get. Players might improve their dexterity by trying to be the fastest guy in the high score.

This game is part of our research about the touch performance on mobile devices and also part of my work as a PhD student. While users play the game we measure where they hit the screen and how fast they are. By combining this information with the position of the keyboard we can estimate how easy each key is to touch. Based on this data we are hopefully able to predict user’s performance with different keys and character sequences. We plan to derive an according model and this model could possibly be used to improve the virtual keyboards of current smartphones.

We hope that we can collect data from thousands of players. That would enable us to derive information that is valid not only for a small number of people but for every user. We are, however, not interested in you contact list, browsing history, or phone number. Okay – if you are good looking I might be interested in your phone number but I don’t want to collect such data automatically ;). In general we don’t want or need data that enables identifying individuals. Thus, we do not collect those things or other personal information.

Type It! is available for Android 2.1 and above. You can have a look at users’ comments and the game’s description on AppBrain or install it directly on your Android phone from the Market.

Hit It! – a fast-paced Android game

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Hit It! is a game for the Android platform that is all about speed and quick fingers. You have to touch and move as fast as you can to see if you can beat all levels. The player’s task is to simply touch each appearing circle as fast as possible. The faster they are the more points they get. Players might improve their dexterity by trying to be the fastest guy in the high score.

This game is part of our research about the touch performance on mobile devices and also part of my work as a PhD student. While users play the game we measure where they hit the screen and how fast they are. By combining this information with the position and size of the circles we can estimate how easy each screen position is to touch. Based on this data we are hopefully able to predict user’s performance with different button sizes and positions. We plan to derive an according model and this model could possibly be used to improve the user interface of current smartphones.

We hope that we can collect data from thousands of players. That would enable us to derive information that is valid not only for a small number of people but for every user. We are, however, not interested in you contact list, browsing history, or phone number. Okay – if you are good looking I might be interested in your phone number but I don’t want to collect such data automatically ;). In general we don’t want or need data that enables identifying individuals. Thus, we do not collect those things or other personal information.

Hit It! is available for Android 1.6 and above. You can have a look at users’ comments and the game’s description on AppBrain or install it directly on your Android phone from the Market.

Hit the Rabbit!

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Fight the dreadful rabbits and crush them with your holy thumb. The shooting season begins with my first game in the Android Market. Your job is to hit as many rabbits as possible. Pan the background around to find some of these evil creatures and hit them with a lusty touch. You can show your skills in different levels that force to hurry up. The time trial mode adds even more variety and you can fight against the clock.

You can download the latest version from the Android Market and don’t forget to give me some proper rating if you like it. Please leave a comment if you have critics or recommendations. In particular, if you have ideas to improve the game. It’s my first game (ever) so please be gentle with me. You find the game in the Market. You can also have a look at the description and screen shots.