iPhone Keyboard Leads to Typso

jfruhlinger writes "One of the selling points of the iPhone was its revolutionary touch-screen full keyboard. But a study has shown that text messages sent from iPhones contain significantly more typso than messages from phones with other kinds of keyboards — and aren't entered any faster."

Comments

I hate the l337 txt culture

[dotancohen]

hu kars so lng as u cn reed it?

Seriously, I've been seeing typing like this appear in blogs recently. Apparently, a certain cellphone-enabled generation is learning that this type of spelling is acceptable. It is not any one cellphone's fault, and it's not the interface's fault either. Guess who is responsible for teaching our children how to spell?

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[ByOhTek]

There's a difference between accent/dialect and being a lazy bastard.

-or and -our have quite different pronunciations, and the way we pronounce color over here, sounds nothing like colour. It has nothing to do with being lazy. This difference is more like cockney (sp?) vs. standard British English.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[MBGMorden]

BUT, it must be noted that this does show that language changes. Color is currently an accepted (and indeed, the normal) spelling of that work in the US, but once upon a time, it would have been a blatantly wrong misspelling. Enough people used it though, and it was integrated.

Seriously, I'd wager that within 150 years elite will be an archaic spelling of the more common and perfectly correct spelling: leet.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[jinxidoru]

I think the study is probably not the greatest study. They are using 20 people in each group. That is a ridiculously small sample group. They also claim that people don't improve with experience. Here is the paragraph:

Surprisingly, the study found that iPhone texters don't improve with experience. The researchers also asked users in the other groups to send text messages using the iPhone. These novice iPhone users made mistakes at the same rate as people who have owned iPhones for at least one month, the study found.

With only 20 people in the entire sample group, we are looking at a very small number of people in the novice vs. experienced study.

I love my iPhone's keyboard. Though I admit that it took time to become accustomed to its use, I now find that I am much faster on the iPhone than on other devices. I think one element of the speed is getting to the point where you accept typos because you know that the iPhone's spell-checker will automatically fix the errors.

not suprising

[Yold]

my only gripe about the iPhone is a lack of hardware keyboard. Seriously, once you have a normal thumb keyboard, you won't want to go back to tapping the screen. Especially for business emails, keystroke accuracy is essential. Misspellings make you look like a moron.

Re:not suprising

[teh kurisu]

I've tried the qwerty keyboards on a Nokia E61 and an iPod Touch. The iPod Touch keyboard is far superior, in my opinion. The E61 keys are lined up in a grid and not like a real qwerty keyboard, they're smaller and closer together and they have to be pushed quite hard for them to register (in comparison, the iPod Touch only requires the lightest touch). It's also difficult to see at a glance which key is which, because it's cluttered up with symbols and numbers (as you can't switch keyboards like you can on the iPod Touch).

For business emails, I'd expect the sender to proof-read before hitting send, no matter what type of keyboard they used.

Re:not suprising

[nine-times]

If it's an important business e-mail, you should be proofreading it anyway. No interface is immune to typos, and even with a spell-check, you can still get the wrong word. Like "it's" and "its", "their" and "there", or "whole" and "hole".

If you don't proofread important documents and communications, then you're going to look like a moron. The input device doesn't matter.

Really?

[MBCook]

The little article I saw about this said they measured people for a month with three keyboards: QWERTY (i.e. blackberry), numeric (i.e. RAZR), and iPhone. They said the iPhone people typed faster, but had more errors.

I wonder if this was fair. The people they found had no experience with the iPhone I'm guessing. But had they used the other two before? Or were these people who never did any kind of text messaging before on the other kinds of phones, or had they used them just a little? That could make a difference.

Does anyone know? This article doesn't seem to mention this either.

I don't own an iPhone, I've only touched one a handful of times.

no tactile feedback?

[Vadim Grinshpun]

Could it be because you can't "feel" the keys? I don't have an iPhone (though I did get to play with one a few times), but the main thing I didn't like about it is that you (1) have to look at the keyboard/keypad to use it (and can't feel your way through it), and (2) at least to me as a newbie, it was not always clear exactly which part of the fingertip is touching the screen, and thus how to place the finger. I'm guessing that the latter is a matter of experience, but the former seems like a real hurdle, since you can't really touch-type. And if you want better accuracy, you do want to touch-type, methinks.

User-Base and Laziness?

[lamarguy91]

Before everyone points at the iPhone, has anyone stopped to take the user-base into consideration? The iPhone user-base isn't the same as bunch of professionals typing e-mails on their desktops or business users tapping away on their Blackberries.

I bet if the same type of study was done with Sidekick users, we'd see a higher error rate as well.

I'm not saying that the phone interface doesn't have anything to do with it. I would never buy one as it doesn't have a keyboard. I simply think the user-base needs to be taken into consideration.

FTA: "iPhone owners also left an average of 2.6 errors/completed message created on the iPhone compared to an average of 0.8 errors/completed message left by hard-key QWERTY phone owners on their own phone."

So is user-laziness a factor here as well? It says that the user "left" errors in the message. I make errors in typing all the time, but I usually correct them. Why not conduct a study to see what the error-rate is without letting the users make corrections. That would be the best way to see just how accurate initial text input was.

It's not supposed to be optimized for typing.

[Odonian]

The 'revolutionary' thing about the iPhone touch keyboard is not that it's a better keyboard than a real tactile one. In fact, it's worse than a real keyboard in terms of accuracy and speed, even with the spell correcting and magnifying keys and click sound etc. The real value of the iPhone keyboard is that it does not take up real estate on your phone, which leaves room for a big screen for other things; pictures, movies, maps, etc. without making the phone a huge unwieldy monster.

In spite of it's shortcomings, it is still more than sufficient for typing search keywords, web urls, quick messages and replies, but if you are a mobile email addict and actually send lots of email, you are probably better off with a blackberry.

Reality distortion field at full power

[WebCowboy]

If you fat finger something, back up and fix it. Its not the phones fault, its the end user's fault.

SteveJ's reality distortion field is still going strong. I don't think I've come across any product defect or design flaw in an Apple product that hasn't had at least one Apple apologist step up and blame the customer. I remember early colour Powerbooks (the 1st-gen PowerPC ones) that had a lot of problems with power cord connectors and battery charging and though most users complained and Apple even admitted fault and issued a recall, there were a number of Apple fans who derided users for misusing or abusing their precious Powerbooks. Later there were white MacBooks that started to discolour after a few weeks of regular use. It couldn't be that snow-white was an impractical choice for a laptop enclosure, or that the plastic or protective coatings were not of high quality--it was the fault of users with their sweaty grubby hands (never mind that the cheap and not-so-cheerful Dells went far longer before showing wear or discolouring).

Right from the days of the ZX81 and Atari 400 until today, it has been proven time and again that flat, non-tactile keyboard surfaces are inferior to keyboards/keypads with raised keys and tactile feedback when it comes to any sort of serious typing. This study regarding the iPhone's on-screen touch-keyboard is not the least bit surprising. Certainly it is no more surprising than an iEnthusiast complaining that users must evolve to accommodate their beloved Apple products.

If you use your mobile for a lot of text messaging the iPhone is an inferior product and you should get a Blackberry instead. That doesn't mean the iPhone isn't pretty or cool or useful for other things, but it is what it is. It isn't stupid user's fault for iPhone typos, it is the design of the iPhone itself. It isn't meant to be a "text message machine"--it merely offers something "good enough" to do the occasional text message when you need to.

Not a new problem at all

[SmallFurryCreature]

Laptops are the way they are, BIG, because they keyboard needs to be big. If you ever have been forced to use a small keyboard, or even one of those horrible flat ones without physical keys you will know why. Our fingers just ain't that accurate while typing. I can blind type fairly but my fingers still depend heavily on the shape of the keys to press the right one.

That is the reason keys on your keybaord are tapered like / \ that so that two keys next to each other /i\ /o\ have a large space between them so that if you slightly miss one you don't hit another.

Keys are also slightly curved inwards for even better guidance of your fingers. Work with a keyboard that doesn't have this and watch your accuracy drop.

This has always been a weakness with touchscreens. For display stands the keyboard is a necesarry evil, while you could do LOTS of intresting things with a touch screen as the input method, the simple fact is that if you want people to start typing, they want/need/expect a traditional keyboard with properly shaped and spaced keys. If people only have to make the most basic inputs, a touch screen will do, and can in many ways help avoid wrong inputs. (Experiment, Prompt the user to enter Y/N, and record what keys they actually press. WARNING: you will loose all fate in humanity when you see the results. Intresting side note, once had a display that at one point asked the user to touch the screen to continue. Should have known better then to use this for a display at a household show. The women touched the screen alright, the sides, the top, the bottom, everything BUT the screen. Granted this was some time ago)

The iPhones touch screen is in many ways totally crap, no tactile feedback on where your fingers are (no homekeys), no tactile feedback on a keypress/release. Way too closely spaced. The "advantage" it has is that physical keyboards at that size are little better, and very prone to breaking.

Why do you think over all these years we still have keyboards with physical keys that are still the same shape as they were on typewriters from before the war? They work.