Building Windows 8 Blog talks touch

One of the main features of Windows 8 is touch and on the Building Windows 8 Blog they have talked about the touch and keyboard features. As is normal for the Window 8 Blog it goes in to plenty of details about the process that has gone into the designing of the Windows 8 touch features and how users interact with on-screen keyboards. 

On my HP Touchsmart I found the on-screen keyboard very usable and I can’t wait to try out the keyboard on a Windows RT tablet.

Read the post for all the detais

When we began planning how touch and new types of PCs might work on Windows 8, we recognized the need to provide an effective method for text entry on tablets and other touch screen PCs. Since Windows XP SP1, which had Tablet PC features built in, Windows has included a touchable on-screen keyboard. But those features were designed as extensions to the desktop experience. For Windows 8, we set out to improve on that model and introduce text input support that meets people’s needs, matches our design principles, and works well with the form factors we see today and expect to see in the future.

I’m writing this blog post on our Windows 8 touch keyboard using the standard QWERTY layout in English. As I look at it, the keyboard seems very simple and sort of obvious. This comes partly from having worked on it for a while, but also because keyboards are familiar to us. But there is more here than meets the eye (or, fingertips).

We started planning this feature area with no preconceived notions. As we do with all our features, we began the text input design project with a set of principles or goals. On a Windows 8 PC using touch, we want people to be able to:

• Enter text quickly, reasonably close to the speed with which they type on a physical keyboard
• Avoid errors, and be able to easily correct mistakes
• Enter text comfortably, in terms of posture, interaction with the device, and social setting

You might note that none of those goals explicitly assumes a keyboard. And when we started the project, we cast a broad net across possible approaches to text input. We found that of all the methods of text input we considered, none met the goals above as well as a keyboard. The majority of people are simply faster, more accurate, and more comfortable typing than they are writing any other way. Windows has highly accurate handwriting recognition in several languages, as well as advanced speech recognition, for example. But without a great touch keyboard, we were not going to be able to fulfill people’s needs and expectations for touch-screen devices running Windows. So we set out to create the best touch keyboard on any device.