iPhone Features Befuddle QWERTY-Using Texters, Study Finds
by Russell Shaw
I, like others, have been poring over this survey of 20 iPhone testers conducted by user experience consulting firm User Centric.
Testers- all iPhone newbies, were put through a series of drills.
One of them involved multiple sending of messages via iPhone as well as their own phone at least 15 times a week. In terms of what the testers brought to this experience, half of the testers owned a QWERTY keypad phone, while the others owned a numeric keypad.
The testing procedure involved the entering of six messages using their own phone as well as six messages on the iPhone. In their sessions, participants were asked to copy 12 standard messages created for this study. Each message was between 104-106 characters in length (including spaces). As User Centric notes, six of the messages each contained 8-10 instances of proper capitalization and punctuation, while the remaining six messages contained no capitalization or punctuation but had some abbreviations. Message configuration and phone order were counterbalanced across participants.
The spolitting of messages across tester’s own phones vs. the iPhone were intended to determine how much more difficult it would be to test message via the iPhone-especially before users got used to the much-ballyhooed new device.
Not surprising then, that texting on iPhone took twice as long as testing on QWERTY phones. Keep in mind, though, that testing on iPhone took a comparable period as testing on numeric keypad phones.
I’m guessing that might be because since the iPhone has an in-device numeric keypad, there was already some degree of familiarity with how to text via a keypad. That’s true even though the numeric keypad used to balance out iPhone for 10 of the testers on-device, not in-device.
One particular issue the QWERTY users experienced with iPhone texting was a tendency to backspace when they made mistakes- a far less efficient way then to discover and correctly learn the predictive or corrective text on the iPhone. None of the 20 testers were able to detect and use the iPhone magnifying glass feature while text messaging.
User Centric ends their report with what they term “Real World Implications”:
“Based on our study’s findings, it appears that QWERTY phone users are likely to suffer some initial decrease in efficiency when switching to the iPhone touch keyboard,” says User Centric. “However, multitap texters may see an eventual increase in text entry efficiency when switching to the iPhone.
“Our study indicates that both QWERTY and multi-tap users are likely to have some level of initial frustration with the iPhone’s touch keyboard and corrective text features,” User Centric continues. “Although our analysis suggests that both types will eventually adapt to the iPhone’s features, the learning curve for texting on iPhones will be steeper for QWERTY phone users than multi-tappers.
