Short links and tiny keyboards: A systematic exploration of design trade-offs in link shortening services

Sandy J.J Gould,Sarah Wiseman,Anna L Cox,Duncan P Brumby

doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.07.009

Sandy J.J Gould, Sarah Wiseman + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.07.009

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Abstract

Link-shortening services save space and make the manual entry of URLs less onerous. Short links are often included on printed materials so that people using mobile devices can quickly enter URLs. Although mobile transcription is a common use-case, link-shortening services generate output that is poorly suited to entry on mobile devices: links often contain numbers and capital letters that require time consuming mode switches on touch screen keyboards. With the aid of computational modeling, we identified problems with the output of a link-shortening service, bit.ly. Based on the results of this modeling, we hypothesized that longer links that are optimized for input on mobile keyboards would improve link entry speeds compared to shorter links that required keyboard mode switches. We conducted a human performance study that confirmed this hypothesis. Finally, we applied our method to a selection of different non-word mobile data-entry tasks. This work illustrates the need for service design to fit the constraints of the devices people use to consume services. A systematic critique of identifier schemas used by existing link-shortening services.A set of computational models that identify potentially superior schema designs.An empirical user study that confirms the superiority of our new schema designs.

Highlights

The chance of a seven character mixed-case link ID needing more than nine taps to enter is 42-92%; across the platforms a link generated by the mixed-case schema is more likely than not to need more than the nine taps required to enter nine lowercase letters
On the Android keyboard, which is superior by virtue of having numbers accessible from the QWERTY keyboard through a long press, the mixedcase schema will require fewer than nine taps on one in five occasions (19%)
We can expect a given bit.ly link to take between one and three (i.e., 11–33%, see E(X), Table 2) more taps to enter than a ninecharacter lowercase link

Summary

Introduction

Link shortening services like bit.ly provide a compromise: the process of typing complex and lengthy URLs is accelerated and human readability is preserved. Many shortening services exhibit little consideration for how links might be made quick and easy to type. On space-constrained mobile devices, entering these characters requires changing the keyboard from lowercase mode to number mode or uppercase mode. Making these mode switches to access different characters is time consuming and error prone (Greene et al, 2014). May not necessarily be faster to type

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