TextTest++

Mingrui "Ray" Zhang, University of Washington [contact]
Jacob O. Wobbrock, University of Washington

About

TextTest++ is a web-based text entry evaluation tool. It can be used to conduct text entry studies and produce scientific measurements for speed, accuracy, efficiency, and more. Text entry researchers, designers, and developers need only to open TextTest++ and have a text entry method transcribe text in the input area. TextTest++ can be used on any platform that has a web browser. It produces results in both CSV and JSON format for download and statisitcal analysis.

TextTest++ builds upon decades of text entry evaluation research by its authors and others, especially the pioneering work by Soukoreff & MacKenzie. (See the Related Publications, below.) TextTest++ is named after the original Windows desktop program, TextTest, which enables text entry evaluations on Windows. However, TextTest was based upon the "input stream model" of text entry, which imposes certain limitations in how users can enter text. TextTest++ removes these limitations by replacing the input stream model with "transcription sequences," enabling much more flexible text entry evaluations.

TextTest++ is also capable of producing a combined speed-accuracy metric of text entry performance known as "throughput" (explained in this blog post). Transcription sequences and throughput are respectively described in our Publications, below.

Publications

If you use TextTest++ in a research project, please cite at least the first of these publications. If you report TextTest++'s throughput metric as part of your results, please cite the second publication as well.

1. Zhang, M.R. and Wobbrock, J.O. (2019). Beyond the input stream: Making text entry evaluations more flexible with transcription sequences. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '19). New Orleans, Louisiana (October 20-23, 2019). New York: ACM Press, pp. 831-842. DOI: 10.1145/3332165.3347922
2. Zhang, M.R., Zhai, S. and Wobbrock, J.O. (2019). Text entry throughput: Towards unifying speed and accuracy in a single performance metric. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). Glasgow, Scotland (May 4-9, 2019). New York: ACM Press. Paper No. 636. DOI: 10.1145/3290605.3300866

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Baidu and by the University of Washington Information School. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of any supporter.

Background Publications

1. Wobbrock, J.O. (2007). Measures of text entry performance. Chapter 3 in I.S. MacKenzie & K. Tanaka-Ishii (eds.), Text Entry Systems: Mobility, Accessibility, Universality. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 47-74.
2. Wobbrock, J.O. and Myers, B.A. (2006). Analyzing the input stream for character-level errors in unconstrained text entry evaluations. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 13 (4), pp. 458-489. DOI: 10.1145/1188816.1188819
3. Soukoreff, R.W. and MacKenzie, I.S. (2004). Recent developments in text-entry error rate measurement. Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '04). Vienna, Austria (April 24-29, 2004). New York: ACM Press, pp. 1425-1428. DOI: 10.1145/985921.986081
4. MacKenzie, I.S. and Soukoreff, R.W. (2003). Phrase sets for evaluating text entry techniques. Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '03). Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (April 5-10, 2003). New York: ACM Press, pp. 754-755. DOI: 10.1145/765891.765971
5. Soukoreff, R.W. and MacKenzie, I.S. (2003). Metrics for text entry research: An evaluation of MSD and KSPC, and a new unified error metric. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '03). Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (April 5-10, 2003). New York: ACM Press, pp. 113-120. DOI: 10.1145/642611.642632
6. MacKenzie, I.S. and Soukoreff, R.W. (2002). A character-level error analysis technique for evaluating text entry methods. Proceedings of the Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI '02). Århus, Denmark (October 19-23, 2002). New York: ACM Press, pp. 243-246. DOI: 10.1145/572020.572056
7. MacKenzie, I.S. and Soukoreff, R.W. (2002). Text entry for mobile computing: Models and methods, theory and practice. Human-Computer Interaction 17 (2-3), pp. 147-198.
8. Soukoreff, R.W. and MacKenzie, I.S. (2001). Measuring errors in text entry tasks: An application of the Levenshtein string distance statistic. Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '01). Seattle, Washington (March 31-April 5, 2001). New York: ACM Press, pp. 319-320. DOI: 10.1145/634067.634256

Copyright © 2019 Jacob O. Wobbrock. All rights reserved.
Last updated October 17, 2019.