Measuring mobile text entry performance and behaviour in the wild with a serious game

Entering text is a fundamental part of how we interact with computing devices. The predominant form of text input on smartphones are virtual keyboards, which provide greater flexibility and customization options compared to hardware keyboards. Mobile text entry performance has been widely studied in HCI research, with most experiments being conducted in a controlled, artifical lab environment. To escape the boundaries of the lab and observe mobile text entry behaviour in a realistic and natural environment, we developed and publicly released the game Hyper Typer on Google Play Store. Hyper Typer is a serious research game for measuring mobile text entry performance and behaviour on a large scale in the real world. Publishing the game on Google Play Store resulted in a total of 2,359 valid transcribed phrases with 71,963 keystrokes. In this paper we discuss the game design of Hyper Typer, present the results collected over a time period of one year after the release of the game and reflect on the advantages, disadvantages and challenges of deploying a research game publicly.