Constructing Chinese characters: keypad design for mobile phones

Abstract

Increased use of mobile phones and associated services in China highlights the need for effective Chinese input methods for mobile devices. Mapping thousands of characters to a standard telephone keypad is a significant challenge. Structure-based methods provide an appealing known-character/known-code solution, but assigning multiple strokes to each key forces users to learn new, often unfamiliar, mappings. Using an established stroke input method, our study revealed important effects of keypad legend on performance. Novice user performance was evaluated with several alternative keypad designs. The results confirmed that both abstract symbols and concrete examples helped improve the usability of the keypad in Chinese text-entry tasks. Further, combining abstract symbols and concrete examples resulted in performance nearly tripling as compared to the original design. The stroke-to-key mapping accuracy also increased significantly. Handwriting analysis confirmed that the reduced errors are directly associated with the keypad-based text-entry technique.

Keywords:

• Chinese text input
• Keypad design
• Mobile input
• Stroke method
• Pinyin method

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ms. Ying Wang for recording the audio dictations used in this study. Motorola funded this research. We gratefully acknowledge their important support that made this research possible as well as feedback on the experimental design and earlier versions of this document. We would also like to thank Jackie Zimmermann for her feedback on earlier versions of this article. Finally, we would like to acknowledge thoughtful feedback of the reviewers and the editor, which allowed us to clarify numerous issues throughout this article.