A Study on the Eye-Hand Coordination for Korean Text Entry Interface Development

Recently, various devices requiring text input such as mobile phone IPTV, PDA and UMPC are emerging. The frequency of text entry for them is also increasing. This study was focused on the evaluation of Korean text entry interface. Various models to evaluate text entry interfaces have been proposed. Most of models were based on human cognitive process for text input. The cognitive process was divided into two components; visual scanning process and finger movement process. The time spent for visual scanning process was modeled as Hick-Hyman law, while the time for finger movement was determined as Fitts' law. There are three questions on the model-based evaluation of text entry interface. Firstly, are human cognitive processes (visual scanning and finger movement) during the entry of text sequentially occurring as the models. Secondly, is it possible to predict real text input time by previous models. Thirdly, does the human cognitive process for text input vary according to users' text entry speed. There was time gap between the real measured text input time and predicted time. The time gap was larger in the case of participants with high speed to enter text. The reason was found out investigating Eye-Hand Coordination during text input process. Differently from an assumption that visual scan on the keyboard is followed by a finger movement, the experienced group performed both visual scanning and finger movement simultaneously. Arrival Lead Time was investigated to measure the extent of time overlapping between two processes. 'Arrival Lead Time' is the interval between the eye fixation on the target button and the button click. In addition to the arrival lead time, it was revealed that the experienced group uses the less number of fixations during text entry than the novice group. This result will contribute to the improvement of evaluation model for text entry interface.

한글 문자 입력 인터페이스 개발을 위한 눈-손 Coordination에 대한 연구