How do People Type on Mobile Devices? Observations from a Study with 37,000 Volunteers

In Proceedings of 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, MobileHCI 2019.
What can we learn about typing on mobile devices from analyzing data of over 37,000 people?
  • Surprisingly, with only 1 or 2 fingers, people type about 70% as fast on mobile devices as on full desktop keyboards. Still, the average performance is only around 36 WPM.
  • Over 74% of people used both thumbs for typing which is significantly faster than using one thumb or index finger.
  • Younger people between 10-19 typed fastest although they spent less time on their mobile compared to those aged 20-39.
  • People using auto-correction typed faster. In contrast, people who manually chose words suggested by the keyboard typed slower.
Example of the experiment
Take the typing test yourself!
Abstract

This paper presents a large-scale dataset on mobile text entry collected via a web-based transcription task performed by 37,370 volunteers. The average typing speed was 36.2 WPM with 2.3% uncorrected errors. The scale of the data enables powerful statistical analyses on the correlation between typing performance and various factors, such as demographics, finger usage, and use of intelligent text entry techniques. We report effects of age and finger usage on performance that correspond to previous studies. We also find evidence of relationships between performance and use of intelligent text entry techniques: auto-correct usage correlates positively with entry rates, whereas word prediction usage has a negative correlation. To aid further work on modeling, machine learning and design improvements in mobile text entry, we make the code and dataset openly available.

Typing test
Click here to download the full video.
The 37K Dataset

Data were collected in a browser-based transcription task hosted on a university server. Our test supports the main mobile operating systems and browsers and was available globally on the Internet. Our participants volunteered via the public website typingtest.com by TypingMaster Inc., a private company offering typing testing and training.

Publication
paper

PDF, 2.2 MB
Palin, K., Feit, A., Kim, S., Kristensson, P., O., & Oulasvirta, A. 2019. How do People Type on Mobile Devices? Observations from a Study with 37,000 Volunteers. In Proceedings of the ACM MobileHCI conference (MOBILEHCI’19). 


        
@inproceedings{palin2019typing,
author = {Palin, Kseniia and Feit, Anna and Kim, Sunjun and Kristensson, Per Ola and Oulasvirta, Antti},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI'19)},
title = {{How do People Type on Mobile Devices? Observations from a Study with 37,000 Volunteers.}},
year = {2019}
publisher = {ACM}
doi = {https://doi.org/10.475/123_4}
keywords = {mobile text entry, word prediction, auto-correct}
}
Contact

For questions and further information, please contact:

Antti Oulasvirta

Email:
antti.oulasvirta (at) aalto.fi

Acknowledgements: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 637991) and the ERC Grant OPTINT (StG-2016-717054). Data collection was supported by Typing Master, Inc.