The Effects of Predictive Features of Mobile Keyboards on Text Entry Speed and Errors

Abstract

Mobile users rely on typing assistant mechanisms such as prediction and autocorrect. Previous studies on mobile keyboards showed decreased performance for heavy use of word prediction, which identifies a need for more research to better understand the effectiveness of predictive features for different users. Our work aims at such a better understanding of user interaction with autocorrections and the prediction panel while entering text, in particular when these approaches fail. We present a crowd-sourced mobile text entry study with 170 participants. Our mobile web application simulates autocorrection and word prediction to capture user behaviours around these features. We found that using word prediction saves an average of 3.43 characters per phrase but also adds an average of two seconds compared to actually typing the word, resulting in a negative effect on text entry speed. We also identified that the time to fix wrong autocorrections is on average 5.5 seconds but that autocorrection does not have a significant effect on typing speed.