CommandBoard: Creating a General-Purpose Command Gesture Input Space for Soft Keyboard

CommandBoard offers a simple, efficient and incrementally learnable technique for issuing gesture commands from a soft keyboard. We transform the area above the keyboard into a command-gesture input space that lets users draw unique command gestures or type command names followed by execute. Novices who pause see an in-context dynamic guide, whereas experts simply draw. Our studies show that CommandBoard's inline gesture shortcuts are significantly faster (almost double) than markdown symbols and significantly preferred by users. We demonstrate additional techniques for more complex commands, and discuss trade-offs with respect to the user's knowledge and motor skills, as well as the size and structure of the command space.

Recommended citation: Jessalyn Alvina, Carla F. Griggio, Xiaojun Bi, and Wendy E. Mackay. 2017. CommandBoard: Creating a General-Purpose Command Gesture Input Space for Soft Keyboard. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 17–28. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3126594.3126639 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3126594.3126639?cid=81500663869