GeShort: One-Handed Mobile Text Editing and Formatting with Gestural Shortcuts and a Floating Clipboard

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GeShort is a novel method for one-handed text editing and formatting on mobile devices. It uses simple rules to facilitate direct cursor positioning, gestural shortcuts inspired by keyboard hotkeys for editing and formatting, and a floating clipboard to enable delayed, repeated, and block editing. A comparison between GeShort and the default Google keyboard revealed that users perform editing and formatting tasks about 11% and 22% faster, respectively, with GeShort. This is achieved by significantly reducing selection time by 11% and action time by 17%. A second study comparing the clipboard features of the two methods revealed that users perform advanced editing tasks 34% faster with GeShort. Besides, participants find GeShort less onerous in mental demand, physical demand, and effort, which likely contribute to the overall performance gain. They also perceive GeShort as faster and easier to use, feel that its functions are better integrated, thus want to keep using it on their devices.