When it comes to smartphones, people are all thumbs — and that’s not a bad thing, according to researchers, who say the speed of smartphone typing is catching up with the speed of typing on normal keyboards.
Smartphone users type only about 25 percent slower than keyboard typists, and some even reach a speedy 85 words per minute, according to a study from Aalto University, ETH Zürich, and the University of Cambridge presented last week at the Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services in Taipei.
With so many people texting, typing skills are improving, and “young people, who spend more time with social media, communicating with each other, are picking up higher speeds,” Anna Feit, a researcher at ETH Zürich and one of the co-authors, said in a statement.
Advertisement
The researchers surveyed more than 37,000 people who took an online typing test on their smartphones, researchers said in the statement. Most of the participants were women in their early 20s, and half were from the United States.
Physical keyboard typists can reach speeds of up to 100 words per minute, but “the proportion of people who actually reach that is decreasing,” the researchers said.
The average keyboard typing speed is between 35 and 65 words per minute, the study said, and smartphone typists average 36 words per minute. The participants spent about six hours per day on their devices.
The researchers said the “typing gap” could close in the future.
“As people get less skilled with physical keyboards, and smart methods for keyboards improve further (such as auto-correction and touch models), the gap may be closed at some point,” the statement said.
Researchers found that people who type with two thumbs, unsurprisingly, type faster then their one-thumber counterparts. Researchers also said autocorrect helps people type faster, while automatic word predictions slow them down.
Advertisement
“If you want to be fast, make use of both your thumbs and turn on autocorrection, even though it might be annoying at times,” Feit told The Guardian.
Younger people who learned to type on their devices were just as speedy on their devices, if not faster, than older people who had taken a keyboard typing class sometime in the past, researchers said.
“We are seeing a young generation that has always used touchscreen devices, and the difference to older generations that may have used devices longer, but different types, is staggering,” Antti Oulasvirta, a professor at Aalto, said in the statement. “It is an intriguing question what could be achieved with a careful training program for touchscreens.”
Anind K. Dey, a professor and dean at the University of Washington’s information school, called the findings “interesting” and “exciting.” He thinks the study shows that smartphones need better word prediction capabilities.
“The most valuable contribution of the paper is the dataset, as it will enable a wealth of research in the years to come. [I’m] a little disappointed that the data collection only used a small number of sentences as opposed to ‘in the wild’ typing, but I understand why given the need to control the study as much as possible,” Dey said in an e-mail to the Globe.
Alyssa Lukpat can be reached at alyssa.lukpat@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @AlyssaLukpat.