The four articles in this special issue of Human-Computer Interaction describe recent research in mobile text entry. The issue begins with a review article that provides general comments on methodologies for evaluating new text entry techniques. The next two articles present Dasher --a text entry technique with an interface driven from continuous two-dimensional gestures and a detailed extension to the prediction model of Soukoreff and MacKenzie. The final article takes a completely different approach to modeling the text entry task. As a collection, the articles represent a sample of promising research initiatives in text entry for mobile computing.
I. Scott MacKenzie is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at York University, Canada. For the past 25 years, MacKenzie has been an active member of the human-computer interaction (HCI) research community, with over 130 peer-reviewed publications, including more than 30 papers in the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI) conference proceedings. MacKenzie’s interests include human performance measurement and modeling, interaction devices and techniques, text entry, mobile computing, accessible computing, touch-based interaction, eye tracking, and experimental methodology.