As someone who writes for a living, a computer keyboard is like a second home and I feel like I could do a good job of typing out a sentence with my eyes closed but whenever I need to respond to a message on my phone, I suddenly become hopeless at typing and need autocorrect to step in and help for every other ducking word.
To help understand why this is, The Focus spoke with Tony Fernandes, an expert in technology user experience who revealed the surprisingly simple reason why typing on a phone can prove so troublesome.
Our initial theories
In an effort to get to the bottom of why typing on a phone keyboard seems to be so much harder than a physical computer keyboard, we put several theories to Tony Fernandes, who is the founder and CEO of user experience firm UEGroup.
Our main belief behind the difficulties of using a phone was that typing is much harder due to the small size of the screen and tiny digital buttons.
We also touted the possibility that thanks to the advent of autocorrect, people have simply become much lazier when typing on a phone and will let the autocorrect software fix any errors.
And lastly, we asked whether finding typing more difficult on a phone was due to psychological reasons, such as attaching the mindset of ‘computer = work’ and ‘phone = fun’ to the different devices and whether that makes people more or less likely to make mistakes.
Tech CEO explains why typing on phones is more difficult than a computer keyboard
Formerly employed by Apple, Tony Fernandes and his colleagues at UEGroup have conducted usability research on over 14 laptop and mobile devices to examine how people perform with each.
“The problem isn’t a psychological one, it is related to human factors,” Fernandes tells The Focus.
“Computer keyboards were designed based on the size of the human finger,” he says. “Old rotary and pushbutton phones were also designed based on the size of human fingers and hands.”
“Modern mobile phone keypads were designed based on the space available, not human fingers,” he adds. “The expectation from mobile phone makers is that people had to adapt to the new size but no matter what the expectation is, there is no way getting around the fact that the tip of a finger can cover several ‘buttons’ on a phone keypad.”
“The software needs to figure out which is the most likely key the user was trying to press and it sometimes gets that wrong,” he explains. “A computer keyboard never needs to guess because it is a physical button. This is why errors happen more often [on phones].”
