Dhaval Jitendra Joshi

Solving the great Indian text input puzzle: touch screen-based mobile text input design

This paper shares the background, design goals, the prototype, and the results of the very first acceptance study of a new Indic text input system based on a touch screen mobile phone, primarily targeted to cater for the majority of population who are not literate in English, or never used Indic text input on mobile phones. The proposed design resolves the complexity associated with consonant modification, applicable to major Indic scripts by providing visual array of modified consonants upon the users selection of a consonant. 60 participants went through the prepared performance test on the proposed input system and they all showed the improvement of performance after typing 16 sentences. The familiarity of the consonant layout and the ease of figuring out how the input worked played a key role in getting user acceptance. Future work is required to refine the design and further investigate on the acceptance among those who have lower level of literacy, and the comparison with other Indic input methods.