Writing on a Phone Versus a Keyboard
This post is written on my phone. My previous post was written with a keyboard. I know before I even start that my previous post will be longer with more detail.
But why?
I have always suspected that the input medium changes the output. Write with a pen on paper and compare your words to the same idea written with a keyboard. They will be different.
Now write with a crayon instead of a pen.
The effort required to put the thoughts into words changes the words. Using a pen means you need to consider the entire sentence, maybe even paragraph, maybe even page, before you commit ink to paper. It is a lot harder to correct your thoughts -- let alone your errors -- with ink. If you need to add a sentence or rearrange your words then you need to write the page again. Or else you need to make so many ugly edits that the words will become illegible.
With a phone, the effort is harder than the keyboard but still okay. I can probably manage a thousand words a day before getting fatigued. On a keyboard, I can manage ten thousand. Worse: the next day, that thousand words will hurt. My thumbs will have sore joints. I may have callouses around my fingernails. Sometimes the skin around my nails gets tough and splits. Sometimes it bleeds and I can't write for days. I get a sore neck. I get headaches. None of that happens with a keyboard.
So those are the physical constraints. But there are mental ones, too. If I am writing with a keyboard, I am also writing with a monitor and using a mouse. I can see my entire work. I can move around. It is easy to jump between screens and files. My thoughts are more complete because my view is more complete.
Changing screens, apps, or files on a phone is a nightmare to steady flows of thought. Just the entire process is frustrating.
And yet, sometimes I prefer writing on phone. Once I have started a project with one input medium, I can adjust my workflow so the entire project can be done in that medium. It might be slower, the words might be different, but that doesn't mean it is worse. Perhaps less words is a good thing -- and the extra effort required to write on a phone screen means there are always less words. This is especially true for dialogue: my characters talk sparsely because it is annoying to find the quote buttons.
Where the problems arise is when I switch between phone and keyboard. Then my thinking just breaks down. My style goes all over the place. I have to choose one input medium and stick to it.
To combat this, I bought a Bluetooth keyboard for my phone. It lives in my car. When the mood strikes I pull into a park near my house after work, put the phone in its cradle, and then type away.
This might be the worst of the lot!
Perhaps it is the keyboard. It was cheap -- $11! Perhaps it is Bluetooth on Android (I have had issues with it before) but it just seems to bring the worst of both worlds.
I can type fast, but the words are full of errors. I can't navigate between screens at all because fingers on screen and fingers on keys don't mix. So I end up deleting large slabs of text by accident, or opening the wrong app, or just getting confused as to where my words are going.
It takes more effort and then more editing to get the same result as phone typing would.
There's no conclusion here, just a few thoughts. Maybe one day the phone ecosystem won't be so combative -- because, let's face it, right now it feels like there is a war raging on your phone between notifications, account sign ins, syncing delays, updates required, screen resizes, etc, etc. For all the UX and customer-thinking that goes into apps, the user still comes last.
Maybe when phone designers realise we want to just use the phone, not fight it, I may finally ditch my keyboard.
Maybe.