1. Bigger keys
A standard phone keyboard fits ten letters across its top row. Flikzi fits seven, because it doesn’t spend space on a shift key, a delete key or a row of symbols: those jobs are flicks and slides instead. Seven keys across the same width makes each key about 40% wider.
On a phone screen about 70 mm wide, ten keys across leaves roughly 7 mm per key. Seven across, after Flikzi’s small side margins, leaves roughly 9.4 mm. A study of one-handed thumb use found that targets for serial tapping, the kind typing is, should be at least about 7.6 mm to avoid hurting speed and accuracy (Parhi, Karlson and Bederson, 2006). A 10-key row sits below that; Flikzi’s keys sit above it.
2. Rounder targets
A thumb doesn’t land on a point. It lands on a patch, a little off-centre, in any direction. A tall, narrow key is forgiving up and down but not side to side, and side to side is where its neighbours are. A regular hexagon is the closest a shape that tiles a surface gets to a circle: the distance from its centre to its edge changes by only about 13% as you go round it. Off-centre taps land inside the key you aimed at more evenly, whichever way they miss.
3. Nearest centre wins
Flikzi doesn’t test your touch against key outlines. It sends every touch to the key whose centre is closest, so there are no borders or gaps to fall between, and the honeycomb’s offset rows keep every key’s neighbours at the same distance.
4. Autocorrect that knows the layout
Flikzi’s autocorrect is built on the Android Open Source Project’s keyboard engine, fed with the real positions of the hexagon keys and the exact point you touched. When a tap lands between two keys, the engine weighs both, so a near miss is read as the word you meant. And it all runs on the phone.
5. Mistakes that undo
- No delete key to hit by accident. Deleting is a deliberate swipe.
- Every delete undoes. Swipe right on a space to undelete, or swipe right on a letter to bring a word back.
- Autocorrect undoes too. Swipe left straight after a correction and the word goes back to what you typed.
What we haven’t measured yet
We haven’t published an accuracy study of Flikzi. Everything above is a design reason, backed by the geometry and by published research on touch targets, not a measured error rate for Flikzi. When we run a study, we’ll publish the numbers here, whatever they are.
Fewer taps, too
The same design that makes room for bigger keys also saves taps: a capital is one flick, a symbol is one slide, a word is deleted with one swipe. See every gesture, or the taps-saved table.