Abstract:

The Interaction Design for Indian Needs lab in the IDC School of Design, IIT Bombay, India has been involved in research with “emergent” users of technology - users who may face constraints such as low literacy, less exposure to technology.  As a part of this, the lab has designed and developed mobile input keyboard “Swarachakra” for 16 Indian languages.  Swarachakra keyboard is a logically arranged keyboard and its unique design pie menu gesture interaction reduces the effort to type the glyphs (हा हि ही हु हू हे है हो हौ) and few other complex compound characters like conjuncts in Indian language.  Another keyboard that is designed by the lab is “Swaravarna” which provides all the most used keys in one layout and doesn’t have any pie menu interaction.

The proposed research will investigate the efficiency and effectiveness of these Swarachakra and Swaravarna keyboards' performance and also with standard keyboards.  The research activity would require to involve users who need to perform typing tasks as per the protocol and using standard phrase sets.