The Input Performance And Cognitive Load Research Of Two Typical Chinese Character Input Devices

Text input is one of the most important ways for human-computer interaction. A good text input device must contain several dimensions, such as high efficiency, low cognitive load, easy to use, interesting and so on. Previous researchers have already made in-depth investigation in this area, but most of them are to introduce the new text input devices rather than compare the existing ones from the user's point of view. Even if there are some scattered difference researches, most are focusing on alphabetic character input, rarely involving Chinese. In view of the huge Chinese computer user group, studying the differences between Chinese character input devices is important for enhancing information exchange and user experience. Our study use dual task paradigm (based on the single task) to investigate the input performance and cognitive load differences of two typical Chinese character input devices (keyboard input and handwriting input) at present, trying to make a full discussion of the input device which has high efficiency, low cognitive load and easy to use in a particular task environment based on the "human-centered" HCI principle.Our study is divided into two parts:first, investigating the difference in input performance between two typical Chinese character input devices with input speed and error rate index; second, probing into the difference in cognitive load between them using the index of speed change based on single task and subjective evaluation of the participants.The main findings of this study are as follows:(1) For the Chinese character which is entirely different from the alphabetic character, keyboard input has more advantages than handwriting input in input speed. Generally speaking, the error rate of keyboard input is much lower compared with the handwriting input.(2) Using keyboard to input Chinese character must represent the Chinese character with the responding alphabetic letters by coding transformation. Compared to handwriting input which is a direct input method dependent on the writing skill, the cognitive load of keyboard input is much higher, so it occupies more attention resources, which is not benefit for two or more tasks being conducted simultaneously.(3) Based on the two points above, the keyboard is a more ideal Chinese character input device in the single task or self-paced condition, but in the multi-cognitive load condition, the handwriting input is much more appropriate.