Metamorphe: Augmenting Hotkey Usage with Actuated Keys

Gilles Bailly (1) , Thomas Pietrzak (2, 3, 4) , Jonathan Deber (5) , Daniel J. Wigdor (5)

1 DT Lab - Deutsche Telekom Laboratories
2 LIFL - Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille
3 Université de Lille, Sciences et Technologies
4 MINT - Methods and tools for gestural interactions
5 DGP - Dynamic Graphics Project [Toronto]

Hotkeys are an efficient method of selecting commands on a keyboard. However, these shortcuts are often underused by users. We present Metamorphe, a novel keyboard with keys that can be individually raised and lowered to promote hotkeys usage. Métamorphe augments the output of traditional keyboards with haptic and visual feedback, and offers a novel design space for user input on raised keys (e.g., gestures such as squeezing or pushing the sides of a key). We detail the implementation of Metamorphe and discuss design factors. We also report two user studies. The first is a user-defined interface study that shows that the new input vocabulary is usable and useful, and provides insights into the mental models that users associate with raised keys. The second user study shows improved eyes-free selection performance for raised keys as well as the surrounding unraised keys.

Mots clés: User-Defined Gestures.; Shape-Changing Interface; Hotkeys; Height-Changing keys; Augmented keyboard; Human - Computer Interaction

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]; Bibliothèque électronique [cs.DL]

Gilles Bailly, Thomas Pietrzak, Jonathan Deber, Daniel J. Wigdor. Metamorphe: Augmenting Hotkey Usage with Actuated Keys. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013), Apr 2013, Paris, France. pp.563-572, ⟨10.1145/2470654.2470734⟩. ⟨hal-00822359⟩