Usability study: iPhone touch keyboard "better than expected"
By John Pospisil
A usability study has found that the somewhat maligned iPhone touch keyboard performs “better than expected” for text messaging tasks.
Chicago-based usability consultancy User Centric conducted a usability test with iPhone customers who purchased their iPhones on the first day of its US release. The goal of this study was to identify overall ease-of-use factors and general usability issues among motivated early adopters who had experience with the iPhone within the first week of ownership.
In the weeks leading up to the launch of the iPhone commentators such as John Dvorak and Business Week’s Peter Burrows had speculated that the touch keyboard could be the iPhone’s downfall. An anonymous source told Dvorak that “The keyboard is a disaster, and people are going to return the phone in droves. I’m guessing 20% will go back.”
However User Centric’s study has shown that the touch keyboard actually performs “better than expected” for text messaging tasks:
“We conduct studies on different text input systems and we were surprised to find that these iPhone users were more efficient with the touch keyboard when composing text messages than they were when using the phones they owned just a week earlier,” said Gavin Lew, Managing Director of User Centric.
Overall, participants were satisfied with features including: visual voicemail, selecting and playing music, saving contacts, and making and receiving calls while using other options. Despite the thumbs up from User Centric for the touch keyboard, participants were frustrated with text entry SMS, as well as the Google map feature, and their web browsing experience.
“While multi-touch technology has been around for over a decade, the unique form factor of the iPhone is very compelling as it opens the door to a whole new set of user experiences. The first few days after launch spawned reviews of the iPhone, but we wanted to conduct the first independent and objective study with actual iPhone users to separate analyst opinion from the actual everyday user,” said Lew.
User Centric is planning a more comprehensive line of research on text entry and use of applications comparing iPhone against other devices and input systems.
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July 15th, 2007
I agree, i have had my iphone just over a week now and i can type faster in its keyboard than I ever could on my blackberry 7130e. the ui does a great job of interpereting my touch intention and the intelligence corrects common mis typings. Dvork is an old fart whose opinion on anything new needs to be taken with a grain of salt.