Study: iPhone texting poses challenges

A small study by usability consultancy User Centric Inc. found that first-time users of the Apple Inc. iPhone took twice as long to compose text messages on the device as they did with their own phone, and that many users preferred the feel of an actual key to the iPhone’s touchscreen.
User Centric had previously identified texting as a possible problem for new iPhone customers.
The 20 participants in User Centric’s study were familiar with text massing; all of them sent at least 15 text messages per week. Ten of the participants owned phones with QWERTY keyboards, and the rest owned phones with a numeric keypad.
In each one-on-one session, participants were required to use their own phones as well as an iPhone; none of them owned iPhones or had used them prior to the study. Participants had to create six messages on their own phones as well as the iPhone, with messages between 104 to 106 characters long, including spaces. They were given one minute to familiarize themselves with the iPhone’s touch keyboard, and had “limited improvements in keyboard comfort” as they progressed, according to User Centric.
User Centric concluded that the experiment was reflective of what a first-time iPhone user would experience: messages generally took longer to enter and users made more typing errors, although User Centric acknowledged this was expected because the participants had much more experience sending messages from their own phones.
User Centric said that the users:
–Noticed the lack of tactile feedback from the touchscreen and mentioned that the “feel of the key” helps them location a button without having to focus on the keypad.
–Expressed “a great deal of frustration with the sensitivity of the iPhone touch keyboard,” and particularly struggled while using the Q and W keys or O and P iPhone keys. A quarter of the study participants asked if the phone came with a stylus that would help them be more accurate given the sensitivity of the screen. The space bar, return and backspace keys also presented problems because they are spaced closely together.
–Participants also did not intuitively discover or properly use iPhone features such as corrective and predictive text, which could have helped them reduce their errors.
User Centric concluded that QWERTY phone users were “likely to suffer some initial decrease in efficiency” when switching to an iPhone, but that “multitap texters may see an eventual increase in text entry efficiency” when switching. The company added that both types of users would probably adapt to the iPhone’s features, but that the learning curve would be steeper for users used to a QWERTY handset.