Design and evaluation of small, linear QWERTY keyboards

• A miniature keyboard is vital for small devices to shrink the size of the devices and expand the display area.
• The number keys of small linear keyboards should be separated from the letter keys.
• Small linear keyboards with square-shaped keycaps had better accuracy than keyboards with rectangular-shaped keycaps.

Miniature keyboard design is motivated by the need for smaller mobile devices with maximum user display area. Thus, this study developed four miniature keyboard designs which varied from conventional keyboard design in terms of their configuration and layout. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the input speed, accuracy, comfort, likability and learnability of four miniature keyboards. Sixteen fast typists and 16 slow typists were recruited to use these four miniature keyboards. The results showed that the rectangular-shaped keycaps of 3 letters with separated keycaps of numerals obtained the best proficiency speed, highest comfort and greatest user acceptance among the four keyboards. Moreover, the keyboards with square-shaped keycaps had better input accuracy compared to rectangular-shaped keycaps. Finally, the proposed keyboards were smaller than current keyboards, and the performance for all of the small keyboards was worse than that of the conventional keyboard.