H.5.2 User Interfaces: Input devices and strategies.

This paper presents a new design of an Arabic keyboard layout for effective text entry on touch screen mobile phones. Our approach is based on Pareto front optimization using three metrics: minimizing finger travel distance in order to maximize speed, minimizing neighboring key error ambiguities in order to maximize the quality of spell correction, and maximizing familiarity for less technologically literature users through approximate alphabetic sorting. In our short user studies, the new layout showed an observed improvement in typing speed in comparison to a common Arabic layout. We believe the opportunity is now ripe to research new optimized keyboard designs where there is less usage experience than Qwerty has in mainstream Western European languages. Pareto optimisation can produce high quality keyboards for alphabet based laguages that could give real benefits where there is less reluctance to change from Qwerty. Author Keywords Touch-screen keyboard design optimization