Two-thumb phone typing approaches desktop keyboard speed

“We were amazed to see that users typing with two thumbs achieved 38 words per minute on average, which is only about 25% slower than the typing speeds we observed in a similar large-scale study of physical keyboards,” said EHT researcher Anna Feit.

One contribution to this result is that the number of good conventional typists is dwindling.

“While one can type much faster on a physical keyboard, up to 100wpm,” she said,  “the proportion of people who actually reach that is decreasing. Most people achieve between 35-65wpm.” However, the fastest touchscreen user in the experiment achieved 85wpm.

As people get less skilled with physical keyboards, and smart methods for keyboards improve further – as auto-correction and touch models improve, for example, the researcher predict that the gap might close.”

Another finding was that 10-19-year-olds can type ~10wpm faster than their parents’ generation.

Over 74% of people screen-type with two thumbs which, it appears, is far faster than using one finger. “the speed increase it offers is very large”, said Aalto University.

Enabling auto-correct offers a clear benefit, while word prediction does not, and nor does manually choosing word suggestions.

“The given understanding is that techniques like word completion help people, but what we found out is that the time spent thinking about the word suggestions often outweighs the time it would take you to type the letters, making you slower overall,” said Aalto University researcher Sunjun Kim.

Most users used some type of intelligent support – only 14% typed without auto-correction, word suggestions or gesture typing.

The authors found no benefit from formal training on the ten-finger typing system on physical keyboards. “This is a type of motor skill that people learn on their own with no formal training, which is very unlike typing on physical keyboards,” said Aalto professor Antti Oulasvirta. “It is an intriguing question what could be achieved with a careful training program for touchscreens.”

The study is being presented at MobileHCI (International conference on human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services) in Taipei today.

A full description of the work can be found here: How do people type on mobile devices? Observations from a study with 37,000 volunteers.

And you too can have a play on the test here.

The volunteers were predominatly women in their early twenties, and about half of the participants came from the US. This said, people form a wide span of ages took part, from more than 160 countries. On average, according to Aalto, the participants reported spending about 6 hours per day on their mobile device.