Are Split Tablet Keyboards Better? A Study of Soft Keyboard Layout and Hand Posture

Abstract

Soft Qwerty keyboards are widely used on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Research into physical keyboards have found split keyboards to be ergonomically better than ordinary physical keyboards. Consequently, the idea of split keyboards has also been applied to tablet soft keyboards. A controlled experiment with n = 20 participants was conducted to assess if split soft keyboards pose an improvement over ordinary soft keyboard on tables with both one-handed and two-handed use. The results show that the split keyboard performs worse than ordinary keyboards in terms of text entry speed, error rate and preference