A proposal for conversion candidate display styles for Kanji input with keyboard

The most commonly used solution to non-alphabet text input, both in Chinese and in Japanese, is to use a Roman alphabet-based phonetic system, such as pinyin in Chinese and romaji in Japanese, as an intermediary. Unfortunately, in these languages the mapping from a phonetic spelling to a written character is not one to one. The user therefore has to select the intended character from a list of homophonic choices. An intriguing user interface design issue is how to display these homophonic multiple candidates. Existing research has paid attention to the display style of candidates which foci on the direction in which the widget is laid out. This study proposes an alternative method of displaying Kanji candidates, called "conveyer-belt method". The visual range for recognizing an object is called central vision which covers only five degrees around the fovea centralis. The conveyer-belt method reduces the need for users to visually scan across the list because the candidates appear, in order, in the one place on the screen. Thus, tiredness and searching time may decrease. We perform user studies to test the new method.