Study Finds that Apple iPhone Keyboard 166% More Error-Prone Than Regular Mobile Keyboard - 3,531 Views, 1 Comment
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Chalk up another to the growing number of Apple iPhone complaints. As if there weren’t enough iPhone problems already, a new study has revealed that even experienced users of the Apple iPhone have more than twice as many errors when typing as do those using regular hard mobile qwerty keyboards, such as on a Blackberry. What’s more, they don’t bother correcting them nearly as much. According to the study, done by the usability consultancy User Centric, “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.” One can only conclude that either a) iPhone users are less intelligent and don’t realize the errors, or b) it’s such a pain trying to type accurately, let alone to fix typos, that they can’t be bothered to correct them. As “a” seems a bit unfair, that leaves “b”. The study, which pitted 20 iPhone owners against 20 people with mobile devices with standard mobile qwerty keyboards and 20 people with alpha-numeric touchpad phones, also found that “the majority of errors made on the iPhone involved substituting a nearby letter for the intended letter.” Remember, these were people using their own iPhones, not brand new iPhone users. So much for the hype about how easy it is to use the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, and to “trust the keyboard.” The study concluded that “The finding that iPhone owners made more texting errors on iPhones than their hard-key QWERTY counterparts (on their own QWERTY phones) suggests that the iPhone may have a higher fundamental error rate. Specifically, the high rate of false alarms for iPhone keys adjacent to high frequency letters is troubling. The iPhone’s predictive and corrective text features do alleviate some of the errors users make while texting, but it does not catch them all.”
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Study Finds that Apple iPhone Keyboard 166% More Error-Prone Than Regular Mobile Keyboard
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When, and now I am going back a few years, the text message turned up as a possibilty to communicate with others, I remember how annoying it could be to write even a short message with hundreds of punches on the keypad, but we slowly learned how to. When the dictionary finally came, some refused to use it. But we learned how to use it and it became even better with its intuitive dictionary. What I am trying to say is that iPhone and all the phones we are about to see with the same type of “keyboard” will eventually, as it evolves, become as natural as textmessaging is today.
Now, we don’t have iPhones where I live- yet. At least not official ones, but I guess that when I get my hands on one of them, I will just try and solve the problems as I go along.
As a last comment; I dread the time when it becomes standard as my hands and fingers are not exactly what you would call tiny. ;) ( I even have problems with the numeric keypads from time to time.)
Comment by Dane — 12/1/2007 @ 1:53 am