|
|
|
| From: "John Whelan" <john.whelan@alatto.com>
|
| > Strongly disagree: t9 predictive text input is used by the majority of
| users
| > in Europe in my experience. It really works very very well and has evolved
| > over the years with now very complete dictionaries in all major languages.
|
| The paper Howard references describes a system that works. Notably,
| however, lots of people fall back on their cute-but-unstandard systems of
| abbreviation instead of predictive input. Why is this?
At Eatoni we've done some research (laboratory and market) on these
issues.
See: http://www.eatoni.com/research/index.html
a couple of key results:
In europe, it seems that about 1/2 of people like T9 as compared to
multi-tap, the other half would rather multi-tap.
T9 is slower than multi-tap when the fraction of non-dictionary
words is about 15%.
Note also that T9 is not available in "most major languages", only 27
languages. Eatoni systems available in 115 languages, at last count.
|
| Anyway, "...the majority of users in [your] experience" sounds slightly
| anecdotal. Does someone have hard figures on actual popularity of
| predictive input?
|
| > What can be simpler than one key input per letter?
|
| "Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler."
| Can you reduce the whole user experience to Huffman coding?
| Claude Shannon estimated that English text has a mere 8-10
| bits of actual information per word. So how come we're all
| reasonably happy with good ol' typing, which requires an
| average of 6 keystrokes per word? Other variables enter in.
|
| Back in the 70s, Xerox was doing lots of human interface work
| on copiers. They tried out measures of frustration like these:
|
| - "total time spent on figuring out and correcting mistakes in operation"
| - "total number of mistakes"
| - "total time spent on task."
|
| Oddly, these correlated very poorly with subjective reactions to
| interfaces. People who made more mistakes in, and took longer
| to finish up, a particular operation on a particular copier, would
| often as not still rate that copier as "more usable."
|
| Why? Because a better measure of frustration turns out to be
| more like "how long it took to solve the hardest problem in
| a series." Making more mistakes, and taking more total time
| backtracking and fixing--but solving each problem faster--could
| actually make people feel better about the whole experience.
|
| Admittedly this is kind of like that thing with vacuum cleaners
| where the loud ones sell better than the quiet ones, irrespective
| of actual cleaning efficiency. But that's people for you.
|
| -michael turner
| leap@gol.com
|
| [Howard]
| > The idea of predictive text entry of the sort "just press the first letter
| > or so and the word pops up"
| > comes up often in the field. It sounds so seductive, but it doesn't work.
| > Meaning, it ends up
| > being much more work for the user, much more mental anguish, and, finally,
| > much slower, than
| > just entering the word directly. (It can be made to work in very special
| > circumstances, my comments apply
| > to all the usual approaches which you see in commerce.)
| >
| > See:
| >
| > http://www.cs.strath.ac.uk/~mdd/research/publications/00dunlopcrossan.html
| >
| > for some research in this area.
| >
| > regards,
| >
| > hag
| >
| > Howard Gutowitz
| > CEO, Eatoni Ergonomics, Inc.
| > www.eatoni.com
|
|
|
| This mail was sent to address hag@eatoni.com
| Need archives? How to unsubscribe? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/
|
|
Received on Sat Dec 22 06:51:24 2001