Donuts: A Chinese Input Technique Using Pressure- Sensitive Marking Menus

Handwriting recognition is often considered as an ideal solution for pen-based Chinese input. However, handwriting Chinese suffers from a performance bottleneck due to the complex structure of Chinese characters. We designed Donuts, a technique that allows a user to enter Chinese characters by navigating through a hierarchical marking menu of phonetic symbols. In particular, to place 12 vowels into a marking menu while keeping the performance, we designed a pressure-sensitive marking menu to organize the 12 vowels into two pressure-sensitive layers. Informal user testing on Donuts has shown positive feedback. ACM Classification: H5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]: User Interfaces. Graphical user interfaces. General terms: Design, Human Factors, Input, Languages.