How long does it take you to type?
Friday, May 23, 2008 | 10:28 AM
We all know that typing on mobile phones can sometimes be a headache -- especially if the phone in question has a small 9-key keypad. On those kinds of devices, we estimate that it takes an average of 40 seconds and 41 key presses to enter a query. When it comes to key presses, that's more than double what it takes on other phones!
In an effort to help our mobile users, we studied the effect of incorporating a feature like Google Suggest on mobile phones with 9-key keypads. We found that these users respond favorably to query suggestions: Users who were shown suggestions while typing their query rated their overall enjoyment higher and perceived workload lower than users who were not shown suggestions. Users who were shown suggestions also reduced their overall key presses by half. Surprisingly, the time to enter a query for these users was not significantly less than the average time needed to enter queries for users who were not shown any suggestions.
You can find a more complete discussion of our results and findings in the PDF version of "Query Suggestions for Mobile Search: Understanding Usage Patterns." It was presented at the CHI-2008 conference last month. Also, we've incorporated Google Suggest on Google's iPhone interface, so try it out if you haven't already!
Labels: chi-2008, google suggest, Mobile Blog
4 comments:
Simon said...
It takes me far less time to type on a 9-key (with T9) than it does to download javascript-heavy pages. Please, keep 'em light!
May 27, 2008 at 7:45 AM
Suresh Kumar A said...
It will take more time if we want to type repeated characters say 'www' . Google Suggest will make keypad users life more easy.
May 29, 2008 at 10:57 PM
Auto Post said...
While I am sure it will go a long way to improving efficiency, predictive text systems are still only a crutch for the cumbersome 9 key keypad. There will always be exceptions, expressions, etc that predictive systems will miss.
Touch screen keypads are also sub optimal. Nothing beats a full keypad with tactile response. More design concepts need to be considered for optimizing the form factor of full keypad devices (e.g. sliders, flips, etc.).
June 3, 2008 at 11:20 AM
Aman Hossain said...
I think the typing problem can be reduced by the T9 function. Now a days all of the major mobile manufacturers are producing the phone that is suitable for fast typing.
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June 7, 2008 at 9:20 PM
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