iPhone texting takes twice as long?

A research firm in the US, User Centric, has reported on their study into how effective the iPhones touchscreen keyboard is.

User Centric used 20 test subjects who had never used the iPhone keyboard before.  10 of these subjects had ordinary numeric keypads on their phones (this group did not use predictive text, but used ‘multitap’ text entry) and the other 10 had QWERTY keyboards.  The researchers asked them to write 6 sample texts using their own phones, and then 6 with the iPhone.

I have a number of problems with this research.

• Firstly, and most importantly, they only used 20 test subjects.  This is a very small number compared to the number of people who own and use mobile phones.  This selection of people may not be random, and thus the results are unlikely to show what the larger population would show.  In short, they could potentially all have been numpties, which is not indicative of the larger population.
• The participants in the study texted with their own phones before this was compared to their performance with the iPhone.  This is an unfair comparison.  To properly compare this they should have been issued with a different phone to their own to compare with the iPhone.  Everyone knows the ‘feel’ of their own phone.  When you get a new phone, texting takes longer.  But when get used to your knew phone you can text much faster.  Using a phone similar to their own, with the same type of keypad would have given a fairer result.
• Participants were given one minute to familiarise themselves with the iPhone.  Again, the problem lies with their prior familiarity with their own phone.  An unfair and probably inaccurate comparison.

It is being reported that the test subjects took twice as long to write a text with the iPhone as they did with their own phone.  This however is not the case.  User Centric have reported on their website that the ‘QWERTY’ group took twice as long when using the iPhone, but the ‘multitap’ group took about the same time.

The study may show that some people take longer to to text using the iPhone than they do their own phone, but QWERTY keyboards are very different to the iPhone keyboard and this can only be expected.  A study into how long it takes people to get back to texting quickly when they get a new phone, whether it’s an iPhone or not, might be more interesting than this.

This study doesn’t really prove a whole lot.  The one good thing is that User Centric now have a list of interface issues and predictive and corrective text issues for the iPhone.  It is available in the reported study on their website.