Since we activated our iPhone yesterday, we’ve been retraining our thumbs to be nimble enough to not mistype on its virtual keyboard. However, usability research firm User Centric has been looking at the effect on business users, and it’s not good news.
“It’s very clear: business users, people who use email a lot, will take a tremendous performance hit, even with all the nice features,” says Gavin Lew, User Centric’s managing director. It’s slightly stating the obvious, to be honest, and probably won’t bother Apple too much, which is pitching the iPhone as a purely consumer device.
User Centric also conducted some tests, getting 60 mobile users to write six fixed-length text messages on their phones - 20 using the iPhone, 20 using phones with QWERTY keyboards, and 20 using regular mobile keypads. It found iPhone users enter text as fast as those with QWERTY keyboards, but make 5.6 errors a message compared to 2.1 of the keyboarders. Lew reckons the answer could be to space out the iPhone’s virtual keyboard a bit more.
(via Information Week)
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