User Centric, a U.S.-based usability consultant company, said it finished a final study that examines the user experience of Apple's iPhone. It found that iPhones have a higher text-entry error rate than their hard-key QWERTY counterparts.
User Centric compared texting experiences of iPhone owners and non-owners across devices and collected information from 60 people who entered specific text messages and performed mobile device tasks. The firm tested 20 iPhone touch-screen owners, 20 hard-key QWERTY phone owners and 20 numeric phone owners. Users entered six fixed-length text messages on their own phones, while non-iPhone users punched in six messages on a test iPhone and a phone of another type. The Blackberry was the other phone for numeric users while QWERTYs used a Samsung E300.
iPhone owners entered text as fast as QWERTY phone owners but made more texting errors. Interestingly, comparing texting performance between iPhone owners and novices (non-owners) on the iPhone found no significant difference in error rates.
"While the iPhone's corrective text feature helps, this data suggests that iPhone users who have owned the device for a month still make about the same number of errors as the day they got it," said Gavin Lew, managing director with User Centric.
For more about the study:
- read this release