Auto completion on iPhone - isn't it strange ?

If you ever wrote something on an iPhone (SMS, notes or mail messages), you'll probably know that this phone uses an auto completion engine completely different from the T9 system available in other cell phones. This system improves the speed of your writing, but not always the quality.

How does it work ?

While digiting a word, the editor searches if it is the start of, or is similar to, any word available in an internal archive. If found, the editor shows a small popup above the word with a proposal. If you don't like the word proposed by the auto completion, you just have to touch the popup and it disappears. Elsewere, when you hit 'space' or 'enter' or another punctuation character, the proposed word is automatically substituted to the one you entered.

Is there something wrong ?

In a standard auto completion system, the proposed word must be confirmed by the user in order to be accepted. When the user looks at the proposal and finds that the word is right, he can choose to stop digiting the word and speed up the writing. On an iPhone, the proposed word must be refused, or it is accepted by default.

This behaviour is everything but intuitive. It works well only if the auto completion guesses perfectly all the words you are writing. When it doesn't, you have to keep constantly an eye on the popup because you need to close proposed words that don't fit. If you miss a word, you have to delete it and rewrite again.

An example. If I digit "My pc is very good" without looking at popups, the message becomes "Mg of os veri golf" (language setting on 'italian'. I hope that english language works better ...).

Great, it isn't ?

This approach, the need to refuse proposals, forces the user for extra activity, and does not allow to concentrate on the real task: writing a message.

In conclusion, the approach of the iPhone is for sure original and interesting, but thinking different not always brings up the best result !

[Translated from USERInterfaccia]