Power Email: Efficient Email Entry on Pen-Based Handheld Devices

Abstract

Email access from handheld devices is cumbersome, partly because of the considerable effort in entering text using pen-based devices. Even though much research has been done on improving text entry speed on handheld devices, little research has been done on text entry for e-mail messages. In this paper, we utilize the user knowledge and application semantics of email to enable easy and fast email entry on pen-based devices. We introduce several text entry techniques that combine Graffiti with a word selection interface where the user can complete words by choosing from a menu. We report several experiments that evaluate these techniques. These experiments revealed that the two most effective methods were personalized text entry and message in context. We measured a significant improvement in text entry speed, reduction in input effort and reduction in input error rate.