How We Type: Eye and Finger Movement Strategies in Mobile Typing

Abstract

Relatively little is known about eye and finger movement in typing with mobile devices. Most prior studies of mobile typing rely on log data, while data on finger and eye movements in typing come from studies with physical keyboards. This paper presents new findings from a transcription task with mobile touchscreen devices. Movement strategies were found to emerge in response to sharing of visual attention: attention is needed for guiding finger movements and detecting typing errors. In contrast to typing on physical keyboards, visual attention is kept mostly on the virtual keyboard, and glances at the text display are associated with performance. When typing with two fingers, although users make more errors, they manage to detect and correct them more quickly. This explains part of the known superiority of two-thumb typing over one-finger typing. We release the extensive dataset on everyday typing on smartphones.