Researchers from Aalto University (Finland), Cambridge University (Great Britain) and ETH Zurich (Switzerland) have analyzed the typing speed of 37,000 smartphone users. This study, the largest to date, sheds new light on average touch screen typing performance as well as on the factors that promote typing speed. The main result of this experiment is that typing speeds on smartphones are catching up with those on physical keyboards.
"We were surprised to find that users typing with two thumbs achieved 38 words per minute on average, which is just 25% slower than the typing speed we observed in a similar large-scale study on physical keyboards," observe the study authors. "While one can type much faster on a physical keyboard, up to 100 words per minute (wpm), the proportion of people who actually reach it decreases Most people reach between 35-65 words" .The authors call the difference between typing on a keyboard and a smartphone a "typing gap" and predict that as people become less adept with physical keyboards, and smart methods for keyboards get even better (such as auto-correction and touch patterns), the gap may be closed at some point. The fastest speed the researchers saw on a touch screen was a user who managed to reach the remarkable speed of 85 words per minute.
The research team collected a dataset from more than 37,000 volunteers in an online typing test. With participants' consent, they recorded keystrokes made while transcribing a series of sentences to assess their typing speed, errors, and other factors related to their typing behavior on mobile devices.
The dataset collected is unique in its size (and has been made available to the public).
- While the majority of volunteer participants were women in their 20s and about half of the participants were from the United States, the study (and the data collected) includes people of all ages in more than 160 countries.
- Many of the participants reported spending about 6 hours a day on their mobile devices. "The accumulated time and experience spent typing explains why young people, who spend more time on social media and communicate with each other are getting faster."
- More than 74% of people type with two thumbs (rather than one finger), which contributes to the increased performance.
- Enabling word autocorrection provides a clear benefit, whereas word prediction, or manually choosing word suggestions, does not. "Techniques like word completion help people: what we found is that the time spent thinking about word suggestions often exceeds the time it would take to type the letters, which generally slows down." Most users used some form of assistance. Only 14% of people typed without auto-correction or suggestion.
- The study also found a strong generation effect. Young people, between the ages of 10 and 19, are about 10 times faster than people in their 40s.
- There is no particular advantage to having been trained to type on a physical keyboard (with all ten fingers).
This study will be presented on October 2 at the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services in Taipei (Taiwan).
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