Anything can happen in the next half hour
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Never mind the quality, feel the Iphone
Boffins at Chicago usability consultancy User Centric took a group of 20 experienced texters who all send at least 15 messages a week to see how they would adapt to the Iphone keyboard. Half the guinea pigs owned phones with a full QWERTY keypad and the rest used phones with a numeric keyboard. None of the participants owned an Iphone. Each person was asked to type six fixed-length text messages on their own phone and six on an Iphone.
It took the QWERTY users almost twice as long to create the same message on the Iphone as it did on their usual phone. While there was eventually a slight improvement, 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," says the User Centric report.
The numeric phone users, used to pressing individual number keys multiple times to get a desired letter or character to appear, took nearly as long to create a message on the Iphone as they did on their ordinary phones. Researchers saw no increase in efficiency as a result of the Iphone's corrective text facility.
Users made an average of eleven errors a message on the Iphone compared to three on their own phone. Although the error rate was reduced by the Iphone's self-correction feature, participants were still frustrated, frequently selecting the wrong keys. They usually corrected these errors by using the backspace key to erase one character at a time. Only seven participants worked out how to use the corrective text feature on their own.
So there we have it - the Iphone might be hopeless and expensive, but it's very shiny. µ
L'INQ
Full study results
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