A usability study has found that iPhone users make more typing mistakes than users of mobile phones with physical keypads. In fact iPhone users made twice as many mistakes as users with hard-key QWERTY keypads.
User Centric – a Chicago-based usability consultancy – ran their study with three groups of users – iPhone users, users of mobiles with numeric keypads, and users of a mobile device with a QWERTY keypad. The study’s findings include:
- iPhone users can type as fast as the other groups, but with significantly higher error rates
- The error rate is not any lower for veteran iPhone users (using for at least a month) than for newcomers
- There are a number of individual letters that have especially high ‘False Alarm’ rates (when you accidentally hit those letters when you intended to hit a different one) – these were: Q (66%), P (27%), J (22%), X (21%), and Z (15%).
I’m not shocked that the iPhone group had more errors – I find the on-screen keyboard harder to get used to than a slide-out QWERTY – but the fact that the error rate is twice as high, and that more experienced users didn’t score any better than novices is pretty surprising. It seems like the correct as you type feature should’ve helped the results more than they did. I did the web-based iPhone typing test again after seeing the study, just for grins, and got 33 words per minute (not bad for non touch typing) but made a fair few errors.
As for those letters with the very high false alarm rates, I know the W and Z get me a whole bunch.
What do you all think? Are you much more error-prone on your iPhone? Slower than on physical keypads?
Check out all of the study details HERE.
Via: PC World
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