Research Shows Touchscreen Typing Now Rivals Keyboards

Why Touchscreen Typing Speeds Are Becoming Faster

You might be wondering why or how touchscreen typing speeds are becoming faster. Well, there are a few plausible reasons for this trend, one of which is increased familiarity with touchscreen devices. Although they are all around us, touchscreen devices are still relatively new. They’ve only been around for a few decades, so not everyone is familiar with them, nor do they know how to effectively use a virtual keyboard. Today, however, most people are more familiar with touchscreen devices than in the past. As a result, they are able to type faster using a touchscreen’s virtual keyboard.

In addition to increased familiarity, most touchscreen devices feature auto-correct. As the name suggests, auto-correct is designed to automatically correct a misspelled word. If you accidentally enter the wrong letter when typing a word on a touchscreen’s virtual keyboard, auto-correct will automatically fit it. It’s a highly useful feature that ultimately increases the average typing speed of touchscreen devices.

The bottom line is that while it’s still faster to type on a physical keyboard, touchscreen devices are gaining ground. The study cited above found the most touchscreen users can type 38 words per minute, which is just 25% slower than the word-per-minute typing rate of physical keyboards.