A Better iPhone Typing Experience

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Porsager

5 min readJan 3, 2018

Typing on the iPhone is hardly close to the experience or efficiency of typing on a physical keyboard with tactile feedback and proper sized keys. That doesn’t stop us from writing huge amounts of text on it (this very post was mainly written on an iPhone), and many different options are available to enhance that experience.

As Apple introduced custom keyboard support 3 years ago I wanted to figure out if they had thrown out the Baby with the bathwater by only including a qwerty keyboard. I had long missed the possibility of typing text on my phone without looking at it, and T9 seemed like the perfect candidate to revive with it’s larger keys and predictive input. Swift was also introduced at the same time so it was a great chance to try that out with a little pet project.

Type Nine was born

Over the course of a weekend, I managed to create a working version of a T9 keyboard based on the corpus of movie subtitles (what better way to finally have a keyboard that knows all the curse words).

The feeling of familiarity when trying it was simply incredible. I guess it had been about 6 years since I typed on a T9 keyboard, but just like riding a bicycle — I hadn’t lost my touch.

After a couple of weeks, using the prototype on a daily basis, I realized there were plenty of ways to improve other common typing tasks.

Better for blind & low vision users

While a lot of normally sighted users already struggle with the small keys of a qwerty keyboard on the iPhone, VoiceOver users have to search for the correct key using touch typing which can take quite some time on a regular qwerty keyboard, or try to use Direct touch which is hard when the keys are so small.

Using VoiceOver with Touch typing on a T9 layout means less searching for the correct key before committing to it, and for most, it quickly reaches a breaking point where you’d want to use Direct touch instead for greater typing speed. Unfortunately, iOS has a bug, so Direct touch doesn’t work with third party keyboards. please fix this Apple 🙏

I think anyone who’ve used T9 — pre iPhone era — remembers how it was possible to type full texts without looking. My first thought was that it only worked so well due to the tactile feedback of the physical buttons, but tapping the right key without looking is very easy due to the larger size. This makes Type Nine a great improvement, and even worth learning for users who have never used a T9 keyboard before.

Multiple languages

For a multi-languaged person, having to switch between languages on the iPhone is one of the more frustrating tasks. Sometimes you have to go to great lengths manually re-correcting words replaced by Apple until finally giving up and switching to the correct language.

With T9 it turned out it was not even necessary to do any automatic language detection. Simply mixing results from multiple languages works extremely well since the overlap of preferred words is so little, and the predictability and control when typing stays the same.

Better text manipulation

If a wrong key is tapped or a word is misspelled with T9 it is often easier to start completely over typing the word. This is quite frustrating if it means tapping the backspace button once for every character in the word. To avoid this, a quick swipe left on backspace will delete the entire previous word, so the correction is as fast as possible. Working a bit more with this, I thought — why not make the backspace button a powerhouse for text manipulation.

Tap deletes the previous character
Swipe left deletes previous word
Holding down deletes continuously
Panning controls the cursor for precision deletion
Swiping down inserts the previously deleted text (undo)

In combination with panning on space to move the cursor, text manipulation is conveniently done straight from the keyboard. No more having to fiddle with the little blue selection pins.

2.0 — Swiping and T9

A lot of people seemed happy about swiping keyboards. While never a fan myself of the qwerty versions, I thought it would be interesting to do with a T9 layout.

It was quite a challenge figuring out a proper algorithm for “sloppy swiping”, and I’m still trying to improve it, but it’s already my preferred way of typing with a single hand.

Future of Type Nine

There’s still not any kind of prediction or spelling helper in Type Nine, but that could definitely make the typing experience even better. I want to play around with that in the foreseeable future since I also need it for another idea I got while doing Type Nine…

How many keys are actually needed for the multi-letter key concept to work properly?