GR1 - Task analysis
User analysis
Users are expected to know English, but are not expected to know Chinese or Japanese. Users can range from novices, who are not expected to have received training on using the tool, or about kanji, beforehand. However, some users will be using this tool in their everyday jobs, and will therefore need to be able to input characters quickly using it.
Novice Users
Don't know the appearance or meanings of any radicals. Don't care particularly about the speed of inputting the character.
Experienced Users
Likely know the appearance and meanings of a handful of radicals. Likely care about inputting characters quickly, but not enough to warrant learning a new language or undergoing extensive training.
Personas / Scenarios
The novice user, who needs to type in only a handful of characters for translation: Sue.
Sue just received a can of food from a friend, that was made in China. Unfortunately, it has no label in English, therefore she doesn't know what it is, or whether she can eat it. She needs to be able to input the characters so that she can look them up on a translation website.
The frequent user, who needs to input a limited set of characters frequently: Mark.
Mark works in data entry at a company. He receives item orders handwritten on a sheet of paper, with the name of the client, and the number of orders. However, clients do not romanize their names, so Mark needs to be able to type the appropriate kanji for their names. Because Mark works in data entry, he also needs to be able to type these names in with reasonable speed.
A person who is training users to type kanji using this children: Sally
Due to the proliferation of kanji in America, the US DoE has made training children to type them part of the K-12 curriculum. Sally is a teacher who is teaching children to be able to type kanji quickly using this tool.
Task analysis
The overall task is to look at a character, and input it into the computer.
Because this tool assumes that users don't know the readings of kanji, the identification and input process will be based on radicals (components of which kanji are composed).
One task will be to identify radicals of which the kanji is composed of. For an experienced user, who might have already memorized the appearance of some of the radicals, this will simply involve looking at the character. For a novice user, however, this task will involve looking at the character, while simultaneously referring to some reference of the appearance of the available radicals.
The next task will be to identify the radicals to the computer. This task can be accomplished either using a point and click interface (which will likely be done by novice users), though expert users might want to use the keyboard for efficiency - for example by typing in some textual representation of each radical (say, the user might type in the english meanings of the radical - for example, to input 語, the user would want to indicate to the system that he sees that it is composed of 言, 五, and 口, so the user might want to indicate these by typing the meanings of the radicals - for example, "say", "five", and "mouth",