A Not-Very-Useful iPhone Keyboard Study
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User Centric brought in twenty owners of other phones--half who had ones with QWERTY keyboards, and half who had ordinary numeric phone keypads. None were familiar with the iPhone. The research involved having the test subjects enter six sample text messages with the phones they already had, and six with an iPhone.
Logical end result: These iPhone newbies took twice as long to enter text with an iPhone as they did with their own phones, and made lots more typos.
But given that they were being confronted with an iPhone for the first time, I'm actually startled that they fared as well as they did. And just about any text-entry system is confounding at first, including other phone-based options like T9, Graffiti, and even the relatively straightforward physical keyboards on a BlackBerry or Treo. (Even a full-sized, typewriter-style PC keyboard is a major challenge to learn--it's just that most of us did so long enough ago that we've forgotten the angst.)
Me, when I first tried an iPhone, I couldn't type more than about five characters without a typo. (It gave me a headache just to type in the WEP code for PC World's Wi-Fi network.) But I stuck with it. And while my experience didn't quite live up to Apple's claim that a week of iPhone use would leave me typing faster than I'd ever done with a small keyboard, I did get pretty fast and pretty accurate. I'm not using an iPhone as my primary handset, but the keyboard isn't one of the issues keeping me from doing so.
But like all input methods, it's hard to say definitively whether the iPhone keyboard is good, bad, or indifferent--a lot of it boils down to issues like personal preference, hand size, and even how long your fingernails are. (I chatted with one friend yesterday who bought an iPhone on day one and is, six weeks later, still very unhappy with the keyboard.)
What would be useful would be to poll a few dozen or a few hundred iPhone users after a few weeks, to see if there was any real consensus on whether the keyboard was a joy or a pain. In our own recent iPhone survey, we didn't ask specifically about the keyboard. But less than a quarter of respondents said they'd had trouble with the touchscreen, and about as many mentioned the keyboard as a plus as complained about it.
Maybe the keyboard is neither a big pro (as Apple would want us to believe) or a significant con (as many people fear, and the User Centric survey might suggest), but simply a different way of doing things with advantages and disadvantages that ultimately balance out.
Anyhow, if any of you reading this happen to own iPhones: Here's a quick-and-dirty poll that may or may not get enough responses to tell us anything at all:
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If you read a bit more carefully into the study, you'll notice that the study is about initial adoption of the iPhone keyboard compared to users' current phones. Also, it isn't a survey, it was a study with one on one interviews where users typed and were timed.
The multitap (Non-QWERTY) users did the same or better with the iPhone than their current method, which suggests that multitappers may have an easier time adopting the iPhone's keyboard than QWERTY users. Which to me is interesting.
The study does not at any time attempt to say that QWERTY users will be twice as slow on the iPhone for as long as they use the iPhone, but it does say they may have more difficulty than multitap users initially. Which to me is interesting.
It would be interesting to see ia study some expert iPhone texters and have them switch to a QWERTY phone to see if there is a similar difference in typing efficiency.