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difficulty of inputting with the proposed methods.
The comments included “It is like a mental exercise”,
“I’m tired”, and “It is not for me”. The on’yomi-based
layout had more positive comments than the bushu-
based layout.
8.2 Long-term Experiment
According to the result of the long-term experiment,
the input speed of the bushu-based layout after 12
months was about the same as that of the QWERTY
keyboard. The long-term experiment was conducted
by one of the authors alone, and therefore it is not ob-
jective. However, it shows that the input speed of the
bushu-based layout could improve with a long-term
use.
Based on the author’s experience, we think that
there are three stages of growth in the input speeds.
The first is to learn the placement of bushu elements.
In other words, the user can remember the locations
of bushu elements without referring to Figure 5. The
next stage is to identify bushu elements of kanji char-
acters whose bushu is confusing. For example, a kanji
character is confusing if it has more than one bushu-
like element. The final stage is to learn the location of
a kanji character. After this, the author knows where
frequently used kanji characters are located. We ex-
pect that the number of such kanji characters will in-
crease as the author further continues it.
The error rate of the bushu-based layout after 12
months is still higher than that of the QWERTY key-
board. There are several reasons. The first is due to
a mistake in the bushu element of a kanji character.
Because of the specification of the input, if the user
makes a mistake in the bushu, a kana character will be
input. The error rate also increases if the user makes a
mistake in the kanji character itself. Since some kanji
characters have similar shapes, users may make in-
putting errors. These problems might be solved after
a longer-term use.
We have not yet compared the bushu-based layout
with other methods with a long-term use. Especially,
it would be desirable to include the on’yomi-based
layout in the experiment.
9 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
This paper proposed a flick-based tablet software key-
board using direct kanji input. There are two types of
layouts: bushu-based and on’yomi-based. The results
of the comparative experiments showed that the pro-
posed methods were not as good as the existing meth-
ods, even if the hint function was provided. Since the
kanji direct input method generally takes long time
to learn, one of the authors by himself conducted a
long-term experiment. After 12 months, both the in-
put speed and the error rate improved. However, they
did not surpass those of the existing method.
Future directions include improving error rates,
improving first impressions, evaluating learning effi-
ciency, and exploring more thorough ways to evaluate
performance. We aim to improve both the error rate
and the first impression by further examining the lay-
out. The evaluation of the input speed requires mul-
tiple users who use the proposed methods for a long
time. Therefore, by distributing an improved version
of the proposed methods, we hope to acquire users
who will use them for a long time.
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