How to Build an SMS Service
ISBN: 789742233
EAN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2007
Pages: 52
Pages: 52
SMS Interaction Design Considerations > High Barrier to Input
Texting is hard. Whether you're using multitap (e.g., tap the 2 on your keypad once for "a," twice for "b," and thrice for "c") or T9 (e.g., allow your phone to guess whether 4663 means "good," "home," "gone," etc.), it's still tough to enter a long message on a cell phone.
The most obvious mitigation strategy is to require little or no input. For example, Dodgeball keeps a database of street addresses of known locations, allowing users to simply name the location, or some unique substring of the location. Twitter allows users to send messages directly to other users simply by preceding the message with the letter "d."
However, an oft-overlooked fact is that many phones support T9 input, meaning words recognizable by a phones internal dictionary may be easier for a user to type than a shorter set of characters that do not constitute a real word. For example, entering the character "@" on a Windows Mobile 5 phone requires seven key taps (the "1" key followed by the down arrow six times in T9 mode or the "1" key seven times in multitap mode). Entering the word "at" requires only two key taps. Choose your syntax accordingly.
NOTE
One December 19, 2006, 18-year-old Ben Cook or Portland, OR reclaimed the title of Guinness Book of World Records Fastest Text Messager from Singapore student Ang Ghuang, 16.
Cook took the championship by texting the standard phrase "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human." in 41.00 seconds. Ghuang's record, set little more than a month earlier, was 41.52 seconds.
How fast are you?