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With the enormous growth in the amount of information and functionality available, it is increasingly important that the desired information and functions can be easily found and made use of through user interface. To enable users to easily find and use the desired information and functions, both user interface content (logical structure) and user interface appearance (physical structure) need to be easily comprehensible for the user. We have addressed this need by developing a system to support user interface designers following a dual approach, that is logical structure design support based on objective and quantitative analysis of languages used by users themselves, and physical structure design support that takes the stages in the design process into account. The proposed system will make it easier for designers to design user interface using the language of users, as well as user interface that reflects their own creativity.

Unlike documents, annotation for multimedia information needs to be input as text, not in the form of symbols such as underlines and circles. This is problematic with keyboard input for non-alphabetical languages, especially the East Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese, because it is labor intensive and imposes a high cognitive load. This study provides a quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of making annotations by hand during a note-taking task in Japanese. Although the lessons learned from this study come from Japanese text input, they are also generally applicable to other East Asian Languages which use ideographic characters such as Chinese. In our study, we focused on both the ergonomic and cognitive aspects and found that during annotation and note-taking task input by hand is more effective than input by keyboard. Finally, we anatomized the keyboard input problem and discuss it in this paper.

We show that the pupil responds to the small area being gazed when it is flashed. The experiments revealed that the pupil reacts to the brightness of the small area being gazed at. Surprisingly, the resolution is 1.6 degrees at the viewing angle. This is equivalent to the spatial resolution of a 21 x 16 mm area at a distance of 60 cm. Finally, the feasibility of the new findings is demonstrated by applying it to character input.