Surprise! Virtual Keyboards on iPhones Have Higher Text Entry Error Rate: Study

When I first wrote about this subject, I received some flak from people who said the study was flawed because the participants in the study had only one week of use with the phone. The initial study was also limited to 10 users. User Centric, Inc., who ran the initial study, promised to do a more complete study in the future and here are their final results.

In this study there were 60 participants, 20 iPhone owners, 20 with standard QWERTY keyboards, and 20 with numeric (AKA "12-key") keyboards. The iPhone owners had all owned their phones for over a month, to satisfy those who say "it gets a lot better after a month" in regards to using the iPhone virtual keyboard.

Each participant entered six fixed-length text messages on their own phones. Additionally, non-iPhone owners also entered six messages on a test iPhone and a phone of another type. The Blackberry was the other phone for numeric users while QWERTY users used a numeric Samsung E300.

Finally, participants also typed two pangrams – a sentence that includes every letter in the English language at least once – and one corpus – a set of characters that represents the exact letter frequencies of the English language, on their own phones (only).

The results? Sorry to burst your bubble, iPhone fans, but while iPhone users could enter text as quickly as QWERTY users, their error rate was 5.6 errors/message, while QWERTY owners had 2.1 errors/message and numeric phone owners 2.4 errors/message.

Not only that, novice iPhone users (recall above that the hard key users also used the iPhone and the other type of hard-key phone) had the same error rate as experienced iPhone users.

The study concluded that "compared to hard-key QWERTY devices, the iPhone may fall short for consumers who use on their mobile device heavily for email and text messaging." You would think this would turn off teens and younger adults, as well as enterprise users, but the sales figures seem to indicate people don't care that much.

A detailed analysis of the study is available at User Centric's website.