Will Touchscreen Text Input Make Normal Keyboards Obsolete?
It has been assumed that the rumored tablet from Apple will be just marginally better at text input than the iPhone/iPod Touch, making writing a laborious process on the device. I think that’s just plain wrong. I would go as far as to say that, for most people, it will be even easier to write on a touchscreen tablet than writing on a computer with a normal keyboard.
Why? Because most people are not proficient touch typists and because a pocket book sized tablet is big enough for normal typing and small enough to streamline the writing process. The biggest obstacle for speedy typing on an iPhone is the size of the virtual keyboard. On a tablet, your fingers should have ample space to perform all of their typing related duties within a conveniently sized area.
If you grab a pocket book and rest your fingers over the surface of the book as it lies horizontally on a table, you will find that there is room for two hands over a decent sized keyboard. There is still space left over for the text you are writing, and this text will be very close to the actual virtual keyboard.
The last thing is important — at least for the majority of users who cannot write reliably without looking at the keyboard. On a device where the text appear immediately adjacent to the keyboard, you gain an important edge: you will be able to monitor and manipulate what you are typing without having to lift your head to look at a screen half a meter away.
Instead, you can quickly glance at the exact spot where you are writing to confirm that you are not making any mistakes, meaning corrections will be faster, but more importantly, since you now are monitoring your typing much more closely, using both touch and vision, you will make fewer mistakes.
LOWER ERROR RATE
When I am writing a text on a desktop computer, I frequently lose track of where my fingers are resting and where in the text I am currently writing.
On a tablet I would be able to keep track of both, keeping my gaze in a small area. With a little training and good on-screen feedback, I imagine my error rate will go down, my speed of typing will go up, and I will not constantly have to engage in laborious error correction, forcing me to grab the mouse to highlight the error, look at the keyboard to find the right keys, type the correction, check that it appeared at the right position, then grab the mouse to put the cursor where I want to continue writing, look back at the keyboard, and start writing again.
On a tablet, all this activity will take place within a small space in my field of vision, and I do not have to grab a mouse or any other devices thanks to the convenience of having my fingers directly attached to my hands.
Touch typists will most likely not fall in love with a normally configured touch screen keyboard — their fingers may get lost on the glassy surface — but the possibility exists to create a user configurable keyboard that is mapped exactly to the users anatomy as the fingers rest in their most comfortable position on the screen, mapping extra key positions that are just in the right place so that the user reliably and comfortably could hit them, creating a optimally designed personal keyboard which could be used without looking. I could imagine a typist could learn to type faster on such a personally adapted keyboard than a normal physical keyboard. You could even envisage a keyboard that senses where your fingers are, automatically adjusting itself to the user.
For the unfortunate majority who has not yet mastered touch typing, myself included, it is difficult to find the right balance between the time your eyes spend on the screen or on the keyboard. If I concentrate on the keyboard, errors can go undetected, which means I constantly have to go back and weed out these errors. On a tablet, I could keep my eyes on the onscreen keyboard and still immediately see any spelling error notifications in the written text, directly adjacent to the touch screen keyboard.
SPEED
If you are accustomed to hammering away with great gusto at a noisy keyboard, a flat glassy surface will not give you the same satisfaction, but the less vigourous touch screen typing should lead to an economy of motion that can be expected to bolster typing speed.
You may lose some speed if the touch screen does not detect your finger instantly as you touch the surface, but the touch screens that Apple currently are churning out are quite fast and responsive, so this should not be a problem provided the touch technology reliably can detect the touch of a finger. Any extremities used for typing need to be alive and well and not exceedingly dry. Mummified Egyptians 1 might find reason to complain — unless they are wet and slimy. The screen works by detecting changes in an electric charge at the surface, so a wet mummy would have a better writing experience than a dry one.
SPEED TESTS
I wrote the same text on a 3.0.1 iPhone 3G S (in landscape mode) and compared this to an ordinary iMac keyboard. iMac text entry was at 43 words per minute and iPhone text input was at 32 words per minute.
Yes, I am an abysmally slow typist, but I find the speed I achieved on the cramped iPhone screen to be respectable, especially since I have virtually no previous experience of touch screen typing. On a much larger tablet, I think it is not unreasonable to expect my speed to approach or even overtake the 43 words per minute score. I could only use two to three fingers on the iPhone, compared to the 8-10 fingers I abnormally use when typing on a regular keyboard.
A tablet with an onscreen touch keyboard is a very adaptable creature compared to the dinosaurian desktop computer or the laptop. The keyboard can take any shape you want. If you are writing with the tablet resting on a desk, you could use a normal keyboard configuration, such as a normal Qwerty 2 or the speedier Dvorak simplified keyboard. 3 If you hold the tablet in your hands, you might automatically be presented with a special thumb-operated keyboard, enabling you to write at very respectable speeds from the sides of the device using two thumbs. If you are at home, you could also use a dock and a keyboard.
And there are other options. The screen of the new Apple tablet can be expected to be large enough to make handwriting recognition work well even when you are writing with a chubby finger rather than a stylus.
Maybe the time is ripe for the old rickety keyboard to go the scrap heap, joining other retired devices such as floppy disks and typewriters. If Apple has managed to meet the design goals of low power consumption and high usability, perhaps laptops and netbooks can go the same way.
And why not throw away the office chairs and desks while we’re at it? Touchscreen technology could spawn completely new kinds of furniture, sporting relaxed reclining writing positions with hands-up armrests.
Combine this with heads-up displays and you could sleep very comfortably at the office while still appearing to be hard at work.
No?
I’ll admit I think desktop computers will keep their traditional keyboards for a long time, but mobile devices need to get rid of them as fast as they can.
- 1 The Curse Of The Mummy, Heritage Key. ¶
- 2 The Curse of Qwerty, Jared Diamond. ¶
- 3 Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, Wikipedia. ¶
Posted: June 1st, 2010 at 14:19 →
Virtual keyboards are terrible, methinks the likes of Google want to get rid of physical keyboards just so they have more screen space available to display ads on.