Why Is Gesture Typing Promising for Older Adults?: Comparing Gesture and Tap Typing Behavior of Older with Young Adults

Gesture typing has been a widely adopted text entry method on touchscreen devices. We have conducted a study to understand whether older adults could gesture type, how they type, what are the strengths and weaknesses of gesture typing, and how to further improve it. By logging stroke-level interaction data and leveraging the existing modeling tools, we compared the gesture and tap typing behavior of older adults with young adults. Our major finding is promising and encouraging. Gesture typing outperformed the typical tap typing for older adults, and was very easy for them to learn. The gesture typing input speed was 15.28% higher than that of tap typing for 14 older adults who had none gesture typing experience in the past. One of the main reasons was that older adults adopted the word-level inputting strategy in gesture typing, while often used the letter-level correction strategy in tap typing. Compared with young adults, older adults exhibited little degradation in gesture accuracy. Our study also led to implications on how to further improve gesture typing for older adults.