I was delighted to try the Swype keyboard on a tablet a few years ago. At the time, I wasn’t used to typing on a touch screen, and Swype felt smoother, more natural, and less sporadic/stoccato than typical touch-screen typing. Being able to type with movement also felt somehow more expressive.

In terms of activity theory, it may have shifted the hierarchy of levels for my typing task. The Object, communication, was the same, and the activity was composing a message on whatever device and sending it to whoever. Deciding on the individual words in that message was a conscious action, but on a lap/desktop keyboard, typing individual letters of those words was (usually) for me an operation, work accomplished unconsciously. Suddenly, on a traditional touch-screen keyboard, I had to pay attention to the placement of my fingers for every. single. letter. It really broke up the flow of writing, because I think we tend to think and communicate in words or phrases, not individual letters. With Swype, instead of having an action for each word and then as many sub-actions as there were letters in that word, I just had word-level actions.