TouchBoard: Reimagining the Ergonomic Keyboard

Despite decades of research, computer keyboards remain largely unchanged due to the enormous cost of acquiring muscle memory for efficient usage. We introduce TouchBoard, an evolution of the well-known keyboard design that expands user interactions through combining touch-sensitive keys, force sensing, targeted haptic feedback, and dynamic key labels. We discuss our design process for the TouchBoard hardware and present an exploratory study comparing TouchBoard with a conventional keyboard. Despite only a short learning phase, participants were able to use TouchBoard with initial performance at about 50% of the regular keyboard.