A Usability Study of the Central-Bantu Multilingual Keyboards

Abstract

Central-Bantu speakers usually use the predominant QWERTY keyboard on a combination of some local and European languages, such as Chichewa and English. There has been no research that looks into usability issues of Central-Bantu speakers typing text in English and in local languages on QWERTY. This article presents our experiments that assess the usability of multilingual keyboards for Central-Bantu language speakers. We first obtained a Central-Bantu layout that is partially optimized from QWERTY, based on the German-QWERTZ keyboard, and a highly optimized version based on the French-AZERTY keyboard. The two keyboard layouts (Entry and advanced-level) were optimized for both English and Chichewa, for a two-finger text-entry mode. Simulation tests measured text-entry rates for Chichewa and English. The usability experiments show that the text-entry rate of English is about (Formula presented.) higher than that of Chichewa, which is close to the prediction of the simulation test. The Bantu keyboards reduced this imbalance to about (Formula presented.). While the simulation tests predicted an increase in text-entry rate, the experimental tests show a decrease in performance. Typing-error rates almost double from QWERTY to the Advanced-Bantu keyboard. In this study, we show that the Central-Bantu keyboards have high practical-performance potential for both Chichewa and English, at balanced usability levels.