Text-based communication is the primary function I use my phone for.
It turns out most Americans are the same.
I find the iOS keyboard not optimized for effective communication especially for the multilingual speakers who often need to switch between many keyboards. Even for people who only use one keyboard, switching between characters and emojis is quite frustrating.
Here are 4 pain points:
1. Inconsistent keyboard switch placement
The close proximity of the switch placements often result users to press the wrong button, sometimes even activating voice control. Not only is eye searching and trying to click the right button causing cognitive overhead, when pressed the wrong button, it could also disorient the user where and which keyboard s/he is on.
2. Switching keyboard is a one direction selection
Once you miss the keyboard you want because you so eager want to pass the other 3 keyboards you have, oops, you have to start over again because you can only scroll through the selections in a single tab mode.
3. It’s a pain in the ass to add a new keyboard
My primary keyboards are English, Emoji, and Chinese, but I occasionally type in Japanese. Since switching between keyboards are so painful every time, I decided to only add Japanese when I need it. But wait, there are 8 clicks (potentially more if you get lost in the setting menu) before you can add a new keyboard and return to chat!
4. Typing your L33t! password is another test on your touch precision
Just think about how many switches you have to do between the capitals, primary symbols, number, and secondary symbols if you like underscore ;) you are very likely to tab between the sets more than 3 times within the tiny keyboard.
Why is typing on a phone way more painful?
It goes without saying that the typing area is a lot more smaller on a mobile when comparing to a computer. Having a bigger area immediately eliminates the need to compress symbols and numbers into a multi-tab experience. Secondly, you can type with two hands and with all ten fingers on a laptop, but on mobile, you can only type with 2 thumbs, sometimes only 1. Typing with ten fingers also means you can do multi-pressing, such as pressing shift for capitalization.
Even though typing on a laptop seems a lot more comfortable, when it comes to switching between languages, it’s still not as ideal as it should be. Switching languages when speaking just comes out naturally from our mouth; there’s no pause, switch mode, then continue. Often times when I want to type in a different language but forgot to switch the keyboard, it becomes like this: ji32/3u vu84ul4fm4a93d8 zo (“I am going to buy coffee later” typed in Chinese keyboard). I believe there should be a way to utilize natural language processing for computers to learn these language patterns and automatically switch languages for you.
Many typing behaviors that we are used to are now squeezed into half of a mobile phone, making me wonder if there are new behaviors we should introduce that’s truly optimized for small screens.
After a quick search in the App Store, I found a keyboard developed by Microsoft called Word Flow. It made typing a lot faster, but it’s only limited for English. I started looking into speech recognition texting and found a stanford study that proves speech recognition could type 3 times faster than manual typing. iOS provides voice control in some keyboards, but it’s limited to the current language that’s being used; it doesn’t recognize mixed language speech. These gave me some ideas on where we are with the current technology.
Possible new ways of “typing”
- Evolve the speech recognition to include a large library for multiple languages where it can distinguish and recognize different speeches as the user transitions between different languages.
- A more intuitive interface for switching between keyboards.
- Develop hardwares for creating natural user interface on phone keyboards.
- Invent a whole new keyboard for typing with one hand — five fingers, like playing piano.
Let’s sketch some ideas on #2
When it comes to mobile interactions, most users have been trained with basic gestures such as swiping left and right on an UI element.
We could incorporate this swiping behavior onto the keyboard.
- Swiping left and right allows the user to switch between the language keyboards. It provides a directional control to help remember and relocate where each keyboard is.
- Providing direct access to add new keyboards on each end of the left/right swipe can reduce the need for users to search in settings.
- Swiping top and bottom allows the user to cycle through a loop between numbers/primary symbols and emojis.
With the assistance of the gesture controls, the keyboard can also be decluttered.
Small improvement, big impact
With text-based communication being the primary use on smartphones for most americans, this quick update on the keyboard can make such a great impact on the overall typing efficiency. Not only is the transition between different languages become smoother, switching between symbols and emojis are also more efficient.
