Hi dear

What is the meaning of new mechanism? Do you mean, you develop new layout for keyboard? Or implement new character map for Unicode of Sinhala?

If you mean a new layout, a good layout should be designed based on frequency of character using. e.g. in English language, characters such as a e i o u are very frequent, so the place of these characters in keyboard designed to be easy for use. You could process some general books context in Sinhala language and count frequency of characters, then based on the frequency of characters, design your keyboard layout.

With Regards

Hello Tulakshana,

if you need a quick and dirty”, reliable tool for measuring the usability and the learnability of your new mechanism on the android you can use the "System Usability Scale" (Brooke). From my experience, it is a short and effective measurement scale; you may only have to rephrase a bit.

If you want to see a short description, here is a link: 

http://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/system-usability-scale.html

Kind regards,

Wiktoria

http://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/system-usability-scale.html

Dear Tylakshana, 

I understood your question that you want to know about any types of possible empirical test. If so, you can test your prototype in two perspectives. Firstly, you can measure the task performance of the users. For example, for the given text entry, you can measure the time for typing given text with your prototype, and then you can compare the result with the conventional keyboards. During such experiment, you can also measure the typographical error rate for each participant. Secondly, you also can measure some emotional and ergonomic factors of the users. For example, ease of use and physical fatigue may be measured with a questionnaire after the experiment.

You can use LUND usability testing, 

Lund, A.M. (2001) Measuring Usability with the USE Questionnaire. STC Usability SIG Newsletter, 8:2

It is good practice to measure BOTH user performance AND satisfaction.  If you measure only satisfaction, you are likely to overlook performance issues.  As Wickens and Andre (1995) say, users often like design features that are not supportive of performance, such as overuse of color. 

Hi

You can prepare a quick test and ask participants to input a paragraph using an existing (standard) text input mechanism and the same paragraph using your proposed input mechanism and  after each task, ask this question Overall, this task was? see http://www.measuringu.com/blog/single-question.php  for more details

Good question.

As Elizabeth said, the best practice is to measure both satisfaction and performance. It also matters how these measures are evaluated and the demographics of the subjects. The issue with subjective questionnaires and interviews is that people lie. In some cases it is considered being polite, since you honored them by including them in the survey they will say only positive. On-line surveys tend to produce negative results because the most people taking the survey are upset. Another issue with the subjective approach is the population necessary for the study. Typically a subjective approach requires 40 or more subjects before the data begins to approach the actual mean.

Another approach is performing a comparative test and use statistical results for performance comparision. It is a simple test to construct, but the primary issue is the math. Measuring human performance is an exercise in measuring learning. Human learning is most accurately modeled by either an exponential decay curve or a power law decay curve. Meaning that it is necessary to use parametric and non-parametric statistics. The good news is that it only requires 7 to 10 cases with 14 to 20 subjects (7 to 10 for each data entry method).  The details of  this approach are documented in An Economical Approach to Usability Testing”, Proceedings of 33rd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference (Compsac 2009), Seattle, WA.

Good Luck.

Link to what @Ahamad was referring to https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230786746_Measuring_Usability_with_the_USE_Questionnaire

@Carl, why do you think people who take online surveys are upset?