Web Tablets and Text Entry — How To Do It?

pcgraphicstablet01_003022

The post I did recently about web tablets and text entry made one thing clear to me — that nothing about it is clear. The point I was trying to make is a valid one, that we no longer passively sit back while web surfing and consume the vast amount of information the web dishes out to us. More than ever before we now interact with that content, and we do it by entering our thoughts and ideas. We do that with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FourSquare and many other web apps. We tell people where we are, what we are doing, how we are doing it and share our lives with others.

We have seen the focus on web tablets shift into high gear recently, with talk about products we are told will be coming soon (CrunchPad), and others we expect to see but have no confirmation we ever will (Apple Tablet). There are a number of web appliances appearing that run the Android OS, and it is apparent that we will see such tablets continue to hit the scene next year.

I stick by my assertion that our interaction with the web means that for any web tablet to appeal to the masses it must be able to handle data entry naturally. The key here is “naturally”, as consumers end up shying away from input methods that do not feel right. We want to get our thoughts into the tablet, and have the device know what we meant and put it in a form that others can consume. This is not as easy as you might think, and it has been a stumbling block for tablet acceptance for years. So what options might be used for web tablets to handle text entry the way consumers will feel comfortable using?

Physical keyboard

The keyboard is certainly one entry tool that cannot be overlooked, even for web tablets. This method hasn’t changed in a long time, but it is the most familiar to consumers. The QWERTY keyboard is still the method used by most for rapid entry of gobs of text. The problem is that for a web tablet to be a thin and light tablet it will not have one of these keyboards. That creates a bit of a dilemma for the genre.

The best way to go to allow the use of a keyboard with a web tablet may be to have a detachable wireless one. Say a thin, special keyboard that attaches to the back of the tablet, yet pops off when needed for entry. This would give users the input method they are most familiar with, but it would have to be done carefully to keep things simple and light. This would also add a cost factor to the web tablet, something that might not work.

Touch keyboard

The input method that will most likely be used is the onscreen touch keyboard. Think of the iPhone keyboard made larger to fit the expected screen size of the web tablet. A multitouch screen could support a keyboard on the screen that is a decent size for typing, and would require no additional hardware nor engineering to use.

What is not clear to me is how good these keyboards will be for extended entries. I have tried using such a keyboard on a 12-inch touch screen, and it is not a very productive method. It’s hard to get any good typing speed with a touch keyboard, and I am not sure how the average user will accept them. It is good enough for very short entries that typically make up a common web session, but falls short with longer entries.

Digital ink

Since the post I made about web tablets was done in digital ink, some folks assumed I was implying that this is the preferred method of entry for these devices. While I am comfortable with using digital ink, it is the result of years of using a Tablet PC. I have to admit that I am in the vast minority when it comes to regular consumers, most will not find inking on a tablet screen to be natural nor comfortable.

This method also adds a significant technical problem to overcome for use in consumer products like web tablets. Users will quickly get frustrated when they write something on the screen and it is not interpreted correctly. As good as handwriting recognition is today on Tablet PCs, I don’t think it is good enough for consumer products. Remember, the point of having good text entry is for longer written pieces, and this is the very type that digital ink has problems producing error-free.

PDA input

Remember the Graffiti input method that the original Palm Pilots used? Believe it or not, there are still quite a few folks who think this method is the best way to enter lots of text on a digital screen. Once the user gets practiced writing letters in a small box on the screen, I have to admit it is amazing how fast text can be entered with great accuracy.

The average consumer is not going to give this method a fair chance, however, so I don’t see this working on a web tablet. Consumers don’t want to practice to make text entry efficient, they just want it to work out of the box. Putting a new interface for entering text is going to meet stiff resistance.

Speech

The biggest obstacle to providing a good text entry method for web tablets centers around how they will be used. Tablets are used in the hands, that is the nature of the device. This makes it difficult to enter text using any of the methods mentioned so far; the user has to enter the text while holding the tablet in one hand. This is the biggest limiter affecting how lots of text can be entered on a tablet. One method that works well in this scenario is speech recognition.

Current speech recognition technology is better than most realize. It is possible to get 98 percent recognition accuracy today, making this a viable method for text entry. The user simply dictates the entry into the tablet, and it converts it to digital text for input on the web. It is the easiest way to handle the entry problem, but it is not without its drawbacks.

The two biggest obstacles to using speech with web tablets are background noise and looks. To get high accuracy converting speech to text requires a controlled noise environment, something tablet users will not necessarily have all the time. Accuracy goes down quickly when dictation is done in noisy environments, and this will be a common scenario. The other obstacle to using speech is more insidious, and that is that users do not like to look silly.

Talking to your computer makes you look silly, and that just won’t fly. Users will be reluctant to do so in front of others, no matter how much they might like Star Trek. Talking to the web tablet in the presence of others will also increase that background noise problem.

So what do you think will work?

These methods to provide text entry on web tablets are the most obvious ones, but maybe there are other ways to do it that are not readily apparent. What do you think? Is there another way to get text into a web tablet that are not mentioned here? Leave your thoughts in the comments, let’s have a good discussion about this.

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post