Directory is crucial to us when we are uncertain of the direction to certain places. In today’s fast-paced world, a directory is aimed to provide helpful and accurate information as fast as possible because users may be quite impatient and want to get things done within a short time.
Recently, I have come across a touch screen directory in One Utama Shopping Centre which is somehow time-consuming. The on-screen keyboard of that directory which is shown in a picture below has taken me a longer time to insert the name of places.
As you can see, the layout of the on-screen keyboard in Pic 1 (ABC layout) is way more different from the layout of the typical keyboard (QWERTY layout). The ABC layout may benefit infrequent keyboard users because they are mostly more familiar with the ABC order rather than the QWERTY order, thus, it can be helpful in helping them to find the letters in a shorter time. However, the frequent keyboard users can be annoyed because they have habituated to QWERTY keyboard instead of ABC keyboard, hence, more time is used than usual when using the ABC keyboard.
Below is the comparison of time between the use of QWERTY keyboard and ABC keyboard to insert “Sephora” by a frequent keyboard user.
As demonstrated, frequent keyboard users almost spent triple the time to insert a word by using ABC keyboard. This keyboard is very inconvenient to frequent keyboard users and undoubtedly can annoy them. A study showed that a user-centered design is crucial to a company’s success by increasing customer satisfaction (Sadeghi & Farokhian, 2011). Hence, it is suggested to provide the selection of these two keyboards so that both infrequent keyboard users and frequent keyboard users can be benefited.
References:
Sadeghi, T., & Farokhian, S. (2011). The role of customer satisfaction in product planning. Middle-East Journal of Scientific Research, 7(1), 39-45.
A Little about Daily Life Design 