[OSK] Chinese users have to scroll word ribbon to find correct character

[Michael Sheldon]

Entering characters via pinyin can result in a lot of potential candidates on the word ribbon, sometimes requiring users to scroll the word ribbon a lot before they find the character they require.

There are two areas that need investigating here:

1) Can we order the pinyin predictions in such a way as to make commonly used characters more easily accessible

2) Can we modify the UI to allow the word ribbon to be expanded to show all characters at once (e.g. a button on the far right of the word ribbon that causes the word ribbon to display characters over the entire keyboard area until a character is selected).

[Jouni Helminen (jounihelminen)]

Mike - is this still an issue? I would have thought option 1) is the desirable one, but wondering how this is handled on other platforms. Have you seen 2) elsewhere?

[Michael Sheldon (michael-sheldon)]

Hi Jouni - We've greatly improved our pinyin predictions and ordering since this bug was first filed, however other platforms do also implement option 2. e.g. on android there's a drop down arrow at the right of the word ribbon, which then displays a grid of characters over the keyboard area (see attached screenshots for an example).

[Jouni Helminen (jounihelminen)]

Thanks Michael.

Yes makes sense to use the whole keyboard area for the suggestions like this.

Can we add a similar dropdown arrow and use the whole OSK for suggestions if that is tapped? Can you use the chevron from the icon theme for this?

Do you need design for this?

[Michael Sheldon (michael-sheldon)]

 I can certainly do most of the implementation without further design input if we're just going for a grid of suggestions overlaying the keyboard (much as android does); although I'd guess you might want to have some design input on how exactly that should be presented? e.g. perhaps we should have bigger fonts than on the word-ribbon to make them easier to press, closer to the key font size? Do we want any visual separators between characters? etc.

[Jouni Helminen (jounihelminen)]

Let's use something like the attached for the expanded pinyin overlay. Scrollable with swiping or tapping the arrow keys, cross at top right closes the overlay. Are the font sizes big enough?

[Michael Sheldon (michael-sheldon)]

Looks good to me, presumably we should increase the font-size for the word ribbon in pinyin (when it's not expanded) as well to match?

[Jouni Helminen (jounihelminen)]

Yes - would make sense to increase the word ribbon for pinyin in both modes