Lock Screen

Kurt Andro – September 19th 2014

Based on "Flip Phone"

Lock Screen

Goals

Additional ease of use and more security by lowering the reluctance to use a "good" password.

Short description

By avoiding unnecessary key presses and wipe commands and by using a larger keypad on the touch display, the reluctance threshold to use passwords (at all) is to be lowered, and at the same time to choose "more complicated" ones.

Problem

To call up the lock screen, it is usually necessary to press a key (Home or Power key) briefly and then perform a wipe input on the touch display.

For entering a password, the rather small standard keyboard often appears at the bottom of the screen.

If you have chosen a password which contains upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters, you have to switch between the letter and number/special character keyboard (maybe several times). In addition you have to type very carefully because of the small keys to avoid a wrong input.

This often results in users choosing a very simple password or even not using one at all.

Solution

The hinged cover makes key presses and wipe entries to reach the password field superfluous. As with conventional cell phones, the display is switched on simply by opening the cover.

A format-filling keypad appears which contains all digits, letters and some special characters. So even "good" passwords can be entered easily and directly.

To enter a capital letter, press and hold a letter key for a short time. Enter special characters in the same way. Briefly pressing the Del key deletes the last character entered. Press and hold the complete input.

For feedback you get a short vibration for short pressing and a longer vibration for long pressing. Acknowledgement tones are less suitable because they could tell other people something about the length and type of the password.

For additional feedback, you will get a number at the top of the display (small enough that only the user can read it) indicating how many characters you have already entered and whether the last entered key was an uppercase letter, lowercase letter, digit or special character.