Time and a word

[j4]

Does anybody know whether there exists a way of timing the writing/sending of a text message? Ideally it'd be some kind of stopwatch that you could set with a keypress and unset once you'd finished (so in fact you'd be able to use it to time other things on your phone as well, but call timing is already built-in for most phones and I'm not sure what else would be useful). Basically I'm interested to know how long it takes people to write and send (without using a template) short messages like "Yes", "No", "Thanks", and "Busy, will reply later". Obviously everybody's typing speed differs, so I guess I'd want to collect data from as many people as possible to get an average speed.

Comments

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I don't know of any way of timing such a thing, but I imagine it wouldn't be hard with two people and a watch with seconds/a second hand.

Are you taking predictive text into account?

[j4.livejournal.com]

I'd need to know whether or not the person had used predictive text, when they submitted their times, yes.

I'd be interested to see if it does in fact slow other people down as much as it slows me down; or whether it only makes them faster because they care less about the message making sense. (I've frequently been reduced to looking at the letter-groupings on the phone keys to try to work out what somebody actually meant, when they've sent me predictive-text SMSs; there are a lot of four-key words which have loads of different possible letters, and predictive texting doesn't grok context.) I guess I could just ask them, but I tend to assume that if they don't have time to send a message that makes sense then they certainly won't have time to send another message to clarify the first message!