A Shortcut for Caret Positioning on Touch-Screen Phones

Jianwei Lai, Navid Rajabi, Elahe Javadi

Abstract: Moving a caret to the desired position in a text field is challenging and inefficient, especially when the user has only one hand available to hold and interact with a mobile phone. We propose a shortcut on keyboards that enables precise and efficient caret positioning in a text field on mobile devices. The proposed method uses a long press on a key to determine the desired position for the caret in the text field. A lab experiment was conducted to compare the shortcut with the traditional handle method and an existing method provided by the Google Keyboard. Even though participants were using the proposed shortcut for the first time, the technique achieved a higher task completion speed comparing to the Google method and was as quick as the traditional handle method. It also showed advantages in accuracy and user perceptions than the other two methods for one-handed interaction.