Microsoft’s Hub Keyboard Cutting down On Toggling Between Apps

Joanitah Nalubega February 29, 2016

1 minute read

Microsoft Office Senior designer Steve Won created an Android keyboard that eliminated the need to toggle between apps while using your smartphone, especially when you’re trying to share information with someone via email or text message. With the Android app released through the Microsoft Garage, Hub Keyboard, which keeps you in your conversation, bringing in relevant information to help complete common tasks, you don’t have to switch between apps o get all your tasks done.

What Does the Hub Keyboard do?

The Hub Keyboard has integrated tasks performed by your smart phone and now you can copy and paste recent items, easily search and share documents, share contact information, and instantly translate parts of messages.

Steve Won, a senior designer on the Office team who came up with the idea for Hub Keyboard about a year ago said, “Personally I don’t like switching between apps to do different things on my smartphone, but all these different apps on a smartphone have to conform to rules of a keyboard and that got me thinking about the project as an interesting idea I wanted to explore more. We’re giving users a wider gamut of tools.”

“I may be in a text message conversation, then have to jump to contacts for a phone number. Rather than forcing users to switch between apps, we bring those apps to them” Won says.

The Hub Keyboard Dev Team

The project which started out as personal project for Won in March 2015 to help mobile users do more within the mobile space was first showcased at an internal science fair where it received a lot of feedback that saw its development in full throttle. Here after, a team of seven emerged to work on the app that would become Hub Keyboard.