JoyFlick: Japanese Text Entry Using Dual Joysticks for Flick Input Users

Abstract

We show JoyFlick: A Japanese text entry method on game consoles with dual joysticks for flick-input users. To reduce the learning cost, the procedure of JoyFlick is designed based on a flick-input, which is a Japanese text entry method that approximately 80% of young Japanese people use daily on smartphones. The user using JoyFlick is able to enter a Japanese basic phonetic character with two joystick operations. In addition, JoyFlick’s widgets spend a little amount of real estate on a screen, making it easy for developers to allocate space for other content. We conducted user studies that compared the performance of JoyFlick with a Kana syllabary keyboard, the de-facto standard for the Japanese text entry method on game consoles. The results showed the followings: (1) after training employing 28 phrases (289 characters, mean entry time $= 373 \,\mathrm {s}$), the flick-input users using JoyFlick can enter texts faster than using the Kana syllabary keyboard; (2) the flick-input users can enter text using JoyFlick 1.53-fold faster (60.1 CPM) than the Kana syllabary keyboard (39.2 CPM) after one-week training in which the users enter texts less than 140 ($\mathrm {M} = 135$) characters per day. These results show that JoyFlick provides a fast and easy Japanese text entry method to the flick-input users using the game controllers and yet spends a little amount of real estate on a screen.