I don't think my fingers are fat, but I have a tough time with the iPhone keypad. I estimate my success rate with it is roughly 1%; ninety-nine times out of 100 I have multiple typos that I need to backspace over to and fix. It feels like I'm trying to repair a watch using two sausages.
For digitally-challenged users like me, help is on the way from Cliff Kushler, the guy who invented the brilliant T9 predictive text system. Kushler's latest invention, called Swype, is a predictive text system specifically designed for touchscreens, so a user can swipe their finger on a particular sequence of letters, like connect-the-dots, and the program spits out the word you're looking for. A demo:
The Swype Beta is currently open and downloadble here if you're an Android user; us iPhone guys will have to wait a few months.
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For example, typing "number" (one of the 100 most used words) into T9 requires me to press 6 keys, because it brings up "ou", "nun" "numb" and "ounce" before "number." The earlier words you don't use that frequently unless you are heavily involved in a church or drug-dealing. If it were actually predictive, "number" would appear sooner - perhaps by using a frequency-of-use ranking first, and then filtering by letter combinations.
Asides from that problem (which I doubt would be addressed) this new swiping method could be difficult if some things weren't addressed:
- you don't know if you over/underswiped a letter until you finish the word. As hipstomp noted, people have trouble precisely selecting letters.
- typing adjacent and repeated letters? How would you swipe "trees?" You'd likely just end up with "ts." And making a small circles on already small letters could be tough without hitting adjacent letters and adding them to your word.
Nitpicking? Maybe. It's an interesting concept that could increase typing efficiency greatly, if the design addressed all the small nuances that could keep users from becoming frustrated and going back to pecking at pixels.... and it looks like they're taking care of most of it.
Maybe adding some feedback (vibration/noise) would help improve accuracy? When a letter is selected, the keystroke sound or vibration could occur?
I was very disappointed that Apple didn't incorporate some type of shape writing, Swype-like input technique for iPad, which seems like an ideal solution.