Optimizing a Personalized Multigram Cellphone Keypad
This work addresses typing inefficiency for mobile phone users, offering a personalized solution that is incremental in optimizing existing keypad designs.
The paper tackled the inefficiency of mobile phone keypad layouts by proposing a genetic algorithm to create personalized layouts based on user text history, incorporating multigrams to reduce strokes, and demonstrated substantial savings in typing strokes through computational analysis and human evaluation.
Current layouts for alphabetic input on mobile phone keypads are very inefficient. We propose a genetic algorithm (GA) to find a suitable keypad layout for each user, based on their personal text history. It incorporates codes for frequent multigrams, which may be directly input. This greatly reduces the average number of strokes required for typing. We optimize for two-handed use, the left thumb covering the leftmost rows and vice versa. The GA mini- mizes the number of strokes, consecutive use of the same key, and consecutive use of the same hand. Using these criteria, the algorithm re-arranges the 26 alphabetic characters, plus 14 additional multigrams, on the 10-key pad. We demonstrate that this arrangement can generate a more effective layout, especially for SMS-style messages. Substantial savings are verified by both computational analysis and human evaluation.