This document describes the development of a novel on-screen keyboard for TV and set-top boxes. User studies were conducted to evaluate the design and identify areas for improvement. The keyboard uses hierarchical navigation with fewer keystrokes than traditional keyboards. User testing found the new design improved typing speeds by an average of 27-41% compared to standard keyboards. Based on user feedback, further improvements were made to the layout, help features, and hot keys.

1. 1Copyright © 2011 Tata Consultancy Services Limited
Novel On-screen Keyboard for TV and
Set-top box
ISCE 14-17 June 2011, Singapore
Arpan Pal
Innovation Lab, TCS

2. Points to cover
• Problem Statement
• Background of OSK Design
• User Study and Results
• Improvements based on User Study
• Conclusions and Future Work

3. 3
Home Infotainment Platform
• File manager
• Media Player
Photo viewer
Music player
Video player
• Internet Browser
• PDF editor
PDF viewer
PDF creator
• Calculator
• Zip/ Unzip
• Open office
• E-Mail client
• Chat client
• Printer access
• Games
• Remote Upgrade
• Provisioning
• Authentication
• Viewing TV content
• Blending of TV and Graphics
• Web Browser
• Audio Player
• Video Player
• Picture Viewer
• Video Chat
• SMS/ SMS on TV
• Remote Upgrade
• Provisioning
• Authentication
GEN 1 Features GEN 2 Features
Low-cost Computing using Television as Display

4. 4
Problem statement
 Typing on TV screen using a Set top Box (Home Infotainment
Platform)
 TV is viewed from a distance.
– Difficult and cumbersome to type using a mouse or traditional
keyboard
– Keyboard and mouse also increases overall cost of the system
– Existing on-screen keyboards require user to go through many key
presses, making the typing process slow and cumbersome.
As a solution to these problems, a novel onscreen keyboard has been
implemented to enable users type efficiently and correctly. It allows
users to achieve the services with less effort and in less time.
– Customized for infra-red remote.

5. 5
Improved Layout for on-screen Keyboard
 Design based on optimizing the number of keystrokes
 Allows faster typing through two-step hierarchical navigation and
selection mechanism for typing.
 Operated by the accompanying specially designed remote control.
 Navigation and selection is done using only 9 special navigation
keys (orange colored) of the remote.
Pal, A et. al., A novel on-screen keyboard
for hierarchical navigation with reduced
number of key strokes,
IEEE International Conference on
Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC)
2009.

6. 7
Typing mechanism
 The on screen keyboard is operated by a remote control.
– The Up, Down, Left and Right keys in the remote-control are used to
move across the key-blocks in vertical and horizontal direction. These
are called Navigational keys
– The Up Left, Up right, Down left,
Down right are used to select a
particular character within the
block and are called selection keys.
– “Ok” key is used to select keys like
Space bar, WWW, .com etc.
Left

7. 8
Evaluation through user study
 QWERTY vs. proposed keyboard
– 25 users were asked to type a particular text using onscreen QWERTY
keyboard and the proposed novel layout.
– Time taken to type was noted and measurements were done in terms
of CPM (characters/min).
– The % improvement in CPM over onscreen QWERTY keyboard is
shown below in the graph.
 Average % improvement
– For email typing is 27%
– For SMS typing is 41%
– For URL typing is 41%
Text Phrase Source: MacKenzie and Soukoreff (2003)

8. 9
User Study (Contd…)
 Users were also asked to get familiar with the layout through some
practice and then same data were recorded.
 There are some further improvements showing the proposed layout
needs some learning time.
 The improvement on an average was 31.8% for email, 29.9% SMS
and 16.69% for URL typing as shown in the graph below.

9. 10
User perception study
 A separate study was conducted on how the new keyboard was
perceived by the users.
– 25 users were approached with the questioner given below and were
requested to provide a rating on a scale of 1 to 5.
o Questions asked:
• Does the keyboard provide enough assistance?
• How is the ease of use of on-screen keyboard?
– To neutralize the effect of outliers the median (middle value of the
rating) and mode (most frequently occurring rating) values were
calculated.

10. 11
User perception study - results
– Users seemed OK with the assistance provided by the keyboard but
there seems to be a scope of improvement in ease-of-use area.

11. 12
Design updates based on user study
 Layout of alphabets - In initial release letters a,b,g,h were in the
same block. Majority of the users pointed out that it would be
better to have a,b,c,d in a block.
 Most frequently used Smileys – Most frequently used smileys were
updated to accommodate user preferences.
 Inclusion of “@” on first screen - based on user feedback.
 Hot keys to speed up typing – 4 colored keys were designed to be
hot keys. Green for typing “space”, red for typing “delete”, yellow
and blue to bring up capital/small letter screen and symbol screen.

12. 13
Design Updates (Contd….)
 Visual effect of key press – During typing user should get some
visual indication on the character itself. The selected character is
momentarily highlighted and then typed.
 Introduction of co-located help – a brief pictorial help was
embedded along with OSK informing users about how to use it.
With this the time required for typing was reduced by 13% on an
average as shown below.

13. 14
Conclusion and Future work
 Conclusion
– Small text typing (URL, SMS) seems to be OK with users
– Long text typing (like email) and ease-of-use still an area of concern
– Improvement in layout, GUI and help based on user feedback
 Future scope of work
– Predictive search can be integrated with OSK to give a better user
experience and fast text entry
– T9 like text entry using infra-red remote
– Multilingual support for OSK

14. Thank you
arpan.pal@tcs.com

15. 16
References:
[1] World Internet Usage Statistics News and World Population Stats.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.
[2] ITU report baffled over RP’s high mobile phone,TV penetration.
http://technews.com.ph/?p=1627
[3] Pal, A., Bhaumik, C., Kar, D., Ghoshdastidar, S.,Shukla, J., A novel on-screen keyboard
for hierarchical navigation with reduced number of key strokes,
IEEE International Conference on Systems,Man and Cybernetics, 2009. SMC 2009.
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Keylekh: a keyboard for text entry in indic scripts, CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human
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[5] William Cooper, The interactive television user experience so far, Proceeding of the 1st
international conference on Designing interactive user experiences for TV and video,
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[6] Arpan Pal, Chirabrata Bhaumik, M Prashant, Avik Ghose, Home Infotainment Platform,
International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Multimedia Applications
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[7] Geleijnse, G., Aliakseyeu, D., and Sarroukh, E. 2009. Comparing text entry methods for
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EuroITV '09. ACM, New York, NY, 145-148

16. 17
References (Contd….)
[8] Tinwala, H., & MacKenzie, I. S. (2010). Eyes-free text entry with error correction on
touchscreen mobile devices. Proceedings of the Sixth Nordic Conference on Human-
Computer Interaction - NordiCHI 2010, 511-520. New York: ACM.
[9] Iatrino and S. Modeo. Text editing in digital terrestrial television: a comparison of three
interfaces. In Proceedings of EuroITV'06, Athens, Greece,2006
[10] Ingmarsson, M., Dinka, D., Zhai, S., TNT-A numeric keypad based text input method,
Proc. CHI 2004: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Vienna,
Austria. CHI Letters 6(1), 639-646, ACM Press.
[11] Költringer, T., Isokoski, P., and Grechenig, T. 2007. TwoStick:writing with a game
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[12] Wobbrock, J.O. and Myers, B.A. (2006). Analyzing the input stream for character-level
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