Dynamic Candidate Keypad for Stroke-based Chinese Input Method on Touchscreen Devices

Abstract -With the popularity of touchscreen devices, physical button-based keyboards are being replaced by finger-operated virtual keyboards. Entering text on these touchscreen devices is no longer limited by finger tapping activities on the keys. Text input can be performed by finger sliding over the virtual keyboard, which is well realized by the Swype technology on a typical QWERTY keyboard. Such shorthand gesturing for text input, however, may be inefficient when directly applied to Chinese input, especially in Chinese stroke-based input method. In this paper, a novel dynamic candidate keypad with use of unidirectional finger gesture on the stroke key for character selection is proposed for enhancing stroke-based Chinese input method. The new design can enhance frequently used Chinese characters searching and input using stroke-based input. The new method is implemented on the Android 2.2 platform for performance evaluation using Traditional Chinese characters set. Experimental results show that the proposed method enables users to input popular Chinese characters easier than conventional stroke-based input methods

Two one-handed tilting-based writing techniques on a smartphone

Text entry is a vital part of operating a mobile device, and is often done using a virtual keyboard such as QWERTY. Text entry using the virtual keyboard often faces difficulties, as the size of a single button is small and intangible, which can lead to high error rates and low text entry speed. This thesis reports a user experiment of two novel tilting-based text entry techniques with and without button press for key selection. The experiment focused on two main issues: 1) the performance of the tilting-based methods in comparison to the current commonly used reference method, the virtual QWERTY keyboard; and 2) evaluation of subjective satisfaction of the novel methods. The experiment was conducted using TEMA software running on an Android smartphone with a relativity small screen size. All writing was done with one hand only. The participants were able to comprehend and learn to use the new methods without any major problems. The development of text entry skill with the new methods was clear, as the mean text entry rates improved by 63-80 percent. The reference method QWERTY remained fastest of the three throughout the experiment. The tilting-based technique with key press for selection had the lowest total error rate at the end of the experiment, closely followed by QWERTY. Interview and questionnaire results showed that in some cases the tilting-based method was the preferred method of the three. Many of the shortcomings of tilt-based methods found during the experiment can be addressed in further development, and these methods are likely to prove competitive on devices with very small displays. Tilting has a potential as part of other interaction techniques besides text entry, and could be used to increase bandwidth between the device and the user without significantly increasing the cognitive load

Méthodologie et instrumentalisation pour la conception et l'évaluation des claviers logiciels

Avec l'expansion des dispositifs mobiles, l'efficacité de la saisie de texte est un défi de plus en plus important pour l'interaction homme-machine. Or, nous observons que, bien que les claviers type AZERTY ou téléphone, traditionnellement utilisés sur ces supports, soient évalués comme sous-optimaux, et, bien que de nombreuses alternatives évaluées comme plus performantes soient proposées dans la littérature, ces nouvelles alternatives restent très marginalement utilisées. Sur la base de cette observation, nous argumentons que la finalité des évaluations ne tient compte que d'un aspect du clavier, aspect qui n'est pas représentatif de la capacité d'un utilisateur à intégrer les concepts proposés dans son quotidien. Nous proposons en conséquence une stratégie complémentaire d'évaluation sur la base d'une évaluation heuristique des claviers logiciels. Par ailleurs, de manière à faciliter la mise en œuvre des évaluations et simplifier le design de nouveaux claviers, nous proposons une nouvelle version (E-Assist II) de la plate-forme E-Assiste. Elle permet, en premier lieu, de facilité le design et le déroulement des expérimentations, et plus largement d'encadrer les évaluations théoriques, expérimentales et heuristiques des claviers. Une version TinyEAssist permet également de déployer des expérimentations sur des supports mobiles (téléphones portables notamment). En second lieu, sur la base de l'étude de la structure des claviers logiciels, nous avons de plus proposé un langage de spécification des claviers permettant de générer des claviers logiciels complexes (interagissant potentiellement avec des systèmes de prédiction) à des fins d'expérimentation ou de simple usage. Enfin, sur la base des critères de performance mis en évidence par les évaluations heuristiques, nous proposons quatre nouveaux paradigmes de claviers. Parmi ces paradigmes deux ont offert des perspectives particulièrement intéressantes : en premier lieu le clavier multi-layer consistant à conduire progressivement, au cours d'une période transitoire, un utilisateur d'une distribution de touches type AZERTY vers une distribution de touches optimisée ; Le second consistant à faciliter l'accès aux caractères type accents, majuscules ou ponctuation, souvent déconsidérés dans l'optimisation des claviers logiciels.The expansion of mobile devices turn text input performances a major challenge for Human-Machine Interaction. We observed that, even if traditional QWERTY soft keyboards or telephone based soft keyboard were evaluated as poorly efficient, and, even if several alternatives evaluated as more efficient were proposed in the research field, these new alternatives are rarely used. Based on this observation, we argue that the goal of soft keyboard evaluation focus on long term performances whereas does not take into account the perspective for a user to use it in his quotidian. Consequently, we propose a complementary evaluation strategy base on heuristic evaluation methodology. In order to ease the evaluation and design of new soft keyboards, we proposed a new version (E-Assist II) of the E-Assiste plate-form. This plate-form aims, at first, to facilitate the design and procedure of experimentations and, more generally, to guide the theoretical, experimental and heuristic evaluations. A compact version (TinyEAssist) enables to perform experimentation on mobile environment such as mobile phone. At second, based on soft keyboard structure study, we proposed a keyboard specification language enabling to generate complex keyboard (including soft keyboard interacting with prediction systems). The generated soft keyboards may be used into the experimentation plate-form or interacting with the exploration system. At last, based on the criteria highlighted by the heuristic evaluation, we proposed four new soft keyboard paradigms. Among them two paradigms showed interesting perspectives: at first the multilayer keyboard consist in accompanying the user from a standard QWERTY layout to an optimized layout during a transition period; the second consist in accelerating the access to the characters such as accents, upper-case, punctuation, etc., frequently ignored in the keyboard optimizations