Typing on Split Keyboards with Peripheral Vision

Split keyboards are widely used on hand-held touchscreen devices (e.g., tablets). However, typing on a split keyboard often requires eye movement and attention switching between two halves of the keyboard, which slows users down and increases fatigue. We explore peripheral typing, a superior typing mode in which a user focuses her visual attention on the output text and keeps the split keyboard in peripheral vision. Our investigation showed that peripheral typing reduced attention switching, enhanced user experience and increased overall performance (27 WPM, 28% faster) over the typical eyes-on typing mode. This typing mode can be well supported by accounting the typing behavior in statistical decoding. Based on our study results, we have designed GlanceType, a text entry system that supported both peripheral and eyes-on typing modes for real typing scenario. Our evaluation showed that peripheral typing not only well co-existed with the existing eyes-on typing, but also substantially improved the text entry performance. Overall, peripheral typing is a promising typing mode and supporting it would significantly improve the text entry performance on a split keyboard.