An Investigation of Techniques for Occasional Numeric Data Entry

This work tested six techniques for the occasional entry of unstructured numeric data in the context of a primarily mouse-based, cursor-positioning, human-computer dialogue. Two of the techniques used a separate keypad for numeric data entry. The other four techniques used the mouse already being used for the cursor positioning dialogue. The keypad techniques were more efficient than the mouse techniques for all of the numeric sequence lengths considered. There were no significant differences in efficiency between the two keypad techniques. Among the mouse-based techniques, an approach based on a displayed image of a calculator keypad was consistently among the most efficient.