What are average speaking speeds and typing speeds?
I have been thinking about a methodological issue - online interviewing vs face to face. One issue is simply the likely amount of data one can reasonably get from an interviewee in a given time. If the average Internet user’s typing speed is 30-40 words per minute (based entirely arbitrarily on what Microsoft seems to think an “average user” might achieve) while the average speed of normal speech is 280 word per minute (again only rather loosely sourced) then given the same time commitment from your interviewee you’ll only get about 15% as much typed info as you would get face to face. Of course there are a lot of other variables in there to help you decide what method to use but I would still be interested to know if anyone can provide proper citeable estimates of typical typing and speaking speeds to use as rules of thumb. It strikes me that differential typing speed might be an under-measured index of the digital divide as well…
February 6th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Yes. There’s such an asymmetry. I can read much faster than others can talk to me, but I can speak much faster than I can type. The most efficient interface for me would be one which I could dictate to for output, and would present me with text for input
As a fairly geeky individual who resisted chat for a very long time (my typing skills weren’t well-developed enough for me to keep out without lots of typos and misspellings, and as a result, I felt it was a modality which made me look stupid) I *strongly* suspect that suboptimal typing skills hold back participation.
Good spoken-word-to-text software exists these days, but it’s not yet user-friendly enough to be in wide circulation. As a result my 75-year-old retired-executive father, who is articulate and well-read, but always had other people do his typing for him, is not the active participant in life online he might otherwise be. If *he’s* facing obstructions, imagine who else might be!
March 28th, 2007 at 10:03 am
I just found some different estimates. These are from a better source - an academic article:
Berger, C. R. (2005) “Effects of Interactive Technology Involvement on Face-to-Face Interaction; Benign Enablement or Insidious Insinuation”, Asian Communication Research, 3 pp. 5-22.
But Berger doesn’t in turn provide a reference to how he gets his numbers - speech = 180wpm, typing = 45-65wpm (it was information provided in passing rather than a core part of his argument).