Anshuman KumarProf. Anirudha JoshiHemruchi Shah

Authors

Globicomp @Ubicomp30 Sept’09

populationPopulation of India1.13 Billion

mobile phones

Increasing at14.38 M/month

billion +Mobile Phones 441.66 Million

population distribution

billion +Urban : 33%Rural : 66%

teledensity

billion +Urban : 33%Rural : 66%

Teledensity : 37.8%Urban : 80.97%Rural : 12.80%

literacy

billion +Literacy: 64.8%Urban : 79.9%Rural : 58.7%

language

Most Popular11 (1B people)

Total Languages122

Most Commonly used Languages in India areHindi – 422MBengali – 83MTelugu – 74MMarathi – 72MTamil – 61MUrdu – 52M………

English Users300 M

Irony of telecommunication in India

‘But for the remaining 800 Million people Language becomes a

hindrance’

“Need for a Devanagari text input systems for mobile phones”

‘All the services are designed for these 300M English speakers’

1

Structure of DevanagariV

M

C

CJ

2 Half Consonants

Issues with Hindi Text Input • Complex script system

• Large number of characters

• Large number of glyphs

• Differences in methods of writing and typing

Existing solutions

Multi-tap two level coding Phonetic mapping

11 2 3 4 5

User Study

• 8 field experts• tested different text input methods • by typing SMS and adding contacts to

the phone book

Heuristic analysis Contextual Enquires

•Middle class users• Hindi speaking• Had received atleast primary education.• They were asked to save a given contact

and type an sms in Hindi.

• The Varnamala needs to be clearly represented on the keypad / screen.

• The diacritic of halant should be highlighted

• The number of characters mapped on each key of the keypad could be reduced

• They want something that’s very simple

User Needs

• Learnability,

• Ease of use

• Speed of typing.

Users Preference

Design Explorations

On screen Keypad Circular layout Stylus based

Joystick based Navigation

Design Refinement

“Saral”

The central button is used to make a selection

Scrollable screen, three lines of text visible at a time. Has a blinking cursor.

The navigation keys are used to move around the grid

When the screen appears ‘अ’ is highlighted by default

Audio feedback

Final Design

Usability Evaluation

‘Saral’ deployed

on Nokia 6300

‘Multi-tap’ Nokia 1100

‘two level coding ’ Samsung

SCH – C140

‘Phonetic mapping’ Sony

Ericsson – J100i

User Profile • Hindi-speaking users • Educational background between 7th to 10th standards• Mobile phone User• Has never typed in Hindi on Mobile phone

Test Plan• 5 users per input method were recruited (5x4)• 5-minute orientation

Test Results

• Saral had the highest success rate without help per user - 53% [43%, 44%, 19%] • The total number of words typed successfully per user - 98%. [89%, 58%, 42%]

For the last six hardest words

• Saral had the highest success rate without help per user (23%) [13%, 13%, 10%] • The total number of words typed successfully per user (93%). [77%, 30%, 20%]

• Saral is a lot more easier for beginners

• The layout and the contextual vowel modifiers helped in easy learning and eventually speed and error free use.

• Audio feedback was preferred by the users.

Conclusion

• Making options visible is important in inputting complex scripts.

• It’s important to tailor-make the input system for a complex script rather than using standard method for all scripts.

We are thankful to Kumar Ahir, Riyaz Sheikh, Shwetha, Nikhil Welanakar and Kirti Kantikar

Prof. Uday Athvankar and Prof. Milind Malshe for their valuable feedback

The participants of our heuristic evaluations and students of course IN 604 ’08

Nokia for part-funding our prototyping effort

Acknowledgement

anshuman.3@gmail.comanirudha@iitb.ac.in hemruchi@gmail.com