IPhone Users Find SMS'ing is 2x Slower Than on QWERTY Phones

Chicago-based usability consultancy User Centric says that it has conducted tests on the iPhone's touch keyboard compared with conventional QWERTY and numeric phone keyboards. Earlier, User Centric had identified texting as potentially problematic for new iPhone customers. The goal of their current study was to determine how easy it was for conventional mobile phone users to text using the iPhone.

User Centric tested the iPhone's texting features with frequent texters to see how rapidly they could adapt to the iPhone's touch keyboard. All 20 participants sent at least 15 messages per week. Ten participants owned phones with a full QWERTY keypad and 10 owned phones with a numeric keyboard. None of the participants owned an iPhone. Each participant typed six fixed-length text messages on their own phone and six on an iPhone.

It took QWERTY users almost twice as long to create the same message on the iPhone as it did on their QWERTY phone. While there was improvement over time, the difference persisted even after using the iPhone for 30 minutes.

"For QWERTY users, texting was fast and accurate. But when they switched to the iPhone, they were frustrated with the touch sensitive keyboard," said Jen Allen, Usability Specialist, User Centric.

In contrast to QWERTY users, numeric users used the "multitap" method of entering text messages on their phones. They pressed individual number keys multiple times to get a desired letter or character to appear. Although multitap is inherently inefficient, numeric phone users took nearly as long to create a message on the iPhone as they did on their numeric phones. There was no increase in efficiency despite the iPhone's corrective text approach.

When using the iPhone's touch keyboard, all participants frequently selected keys that they had not intended. Participants usually corrected these errors by using the backspace key to erase one character at a time. Only 7 participants figured out how to use the corrective text feature on their own.

User Centric says that it was aware that participants? prior familiarity with their own phones meant that there would likely be a learning curve associated with text messaging on the iPhone. (None of the participants had used an iPhone prior to the study). Although participants were given one minute to familiarize themselves with the iPhone?s touch keyboard, their texting abilities on the iPhone were still at the novice level. Throughout the study, we did notice limited improvements in keyboard comfort as users progressed through the tasks on the iPhone. Overall, the findings in the study can be taken as a good representation of what iPhone text messaging is like for a customer who has just bought an iPhone and is using it for the first time.

"It's important to consider the changes a person has to make when they switch to the iPhone," said Gavin Lew, Managing Director at User Centric. "It should be easy for people to do common tasks, such as text messaging, using the iPhone's less traditional touch interface."

The complete summary of this study is available at http://www.usercentric.com/iPhoneTextEntry.html

Posted to the site on 16th August 2007