A Guide To Designing Touch Keyboards

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August 20, 2013

Christian Holst

Touch devices have rightfully been praised for generally being much more intuitive than the decades-old computer mouse and keyboard. Users interact directly with touch interfaces, which narrows the gap between human act and software response. Yet typing on mobile devices — in particular on smartphones — is quite the horror story. It’s slow, painful and error-prone.

The obvious culprits are keyboard character size and proximity of the keys, but there are many other important aspects to consider, including:

• using auto-correct dictionaries appropriately,
• auto-capitalizing relevantly,
• hinting at the input type,
• honoring the tab sequence,
• invoking custom keyboards consistently.