Do iOS auto-corrects point to an inability to spell or flaws in iOS functionality discoverability?
Damn You, Auto Correct (DYAC), if you’ve not seen it, is a site that showcases amusing typos in text messages. These mostly occur due to the auto-correct functionality in iOS, which aims to guess what you’re writing, replacing misspellings accordingly. It’s pretty clear that a good number of the submissions to the site are set-up, but some are unintentional errors.
With DYAC having been in my RSS feed for a while now, I’ve started to notice a number of patterns. A good number of the replacements are down to user error. There’s a trend, especially in the US, to add a bunch of letters to the end of words, for emphasis. This is illustrated in the entry Learn From Your Fail:
There are also many examples on the site of people who simply do not know how to spell certain words, and so iOS makes its best guess, often to comical effect. However, Father And Son shows another side of auto-correct:
This post’s contributor said his mother was trying to remind him to drop his dad off, not, er, something else entirely. There are quite a few posts along these lines on the site, often from older users. People claim their phone (typically their iPhone) is ‘changing’ their words. I therefore wonder if there’s a discoverability problem here, in people not noticing when iOS offers an alternate spelling; either that or there’s a usability issue in people not knowing how to pick a word when iOS isn’t sure what you meant to type.
It’s also pretty infuriating that iOS still denies you access to its custom dictionary, yet is insanely over-zealous about storing and offering back your more bizarre words. Type a long string in caps and deny iOS changing it to a string of its own devising and you’ll find it subsequently popping up time and time again. While you can nuke your entire custom dictionary in Settings, it’s absurd that Apple doesn’t enable finer control over custom words and mappings, although I suspect DYAC is pretty happy about that, as are its followers.
I can touch-type at a physical keyboard, always watching the monitor, always seeing exactly what I’m typing. When I use the iOS virtual keyboard, on the other hand, touch-typing is an impossibility, and I have to look at the virtual keys to pick out the letters I want to type…which means that I often don’t notice the auto-correct going about its business on the top half of the screen. Surely it would make more sense to display auto-correct suggestions in the part of the screen the user is looking at?
(It occurs to me that this might be a problem only for touch-typists. For anyone else, glancing back and forth from the keyboard to the monitor, quickly and regularly, is an ingrained habit that serves them well on an iOS device.)
And yes, it is crazy-making that we can’t access the custom dictionary!
Here’s how it usually works for me: I know that I’m typing an obscure word or a proper noun, so I’m ready and waiting for auto-correct to pop up. When it does, I dismiss the suggestion and continue typing. But what I didn’t realise was that, in fact, I had misspelled the obscure word or proper noun! And now that misspelling is stuck in the dictionary forever…
I wrote a long rant here about having to set up iPads and tell people about simple stuff like autocorrect, but I’ll spare you.
I hope Apple would stop depending only on Apple Store salespeople to explain these things and produce some extensive videos on these features. Most people won’t RTFM, but can be pointed towards helpful videos. The existing ones on the iPad2 are more like commercials.
There was a brilliant Armstrong & Miller sketch about two old professors trying to come up with an auto-correct dictionary. For example, they suggested “shiv” would be more popular…
Yeah, I remember that. Sounds about right, although judging by DYAC, iOS is infatuated by ‘anal’.
Great share, an instant RSS follow.
I used to have the same problem with my Blackberry a few years back, but of course I couldn’t take screenshots back then. One thing I liked about Blackberry (maybe the only thing) was that I could change the autocorrect dictionary, adjust items, remove bad ones, etc. It made the overall experience of texting/emailing more professional. I wish iOS would add something like this.
To be honest I think it’s secret option 3 – 90% of DYAC is entirely fake.
I don’t have a problem with the iOS autocorrect much of the time, except that it’s too damn aggressive. Editing the custom dictionary would be a plus, too.
An unrelated autocorrect story: my iPhone has learnt, among other things, the strings “CraigGrannell” and “IanBetteridge”. The reason? I often email links from Twitterific to Instapaper, and I append @username to the subject of the email, so your usernames have been learnt by my phone. Those two strings, at least, only kick in when needed.