Abstract
Mobile industrial workers are bringing new expectations of familiar and intuitive experiences from their smartphones to the rugged industrial work environment. The impact of moving from physical keys on dedicated, enterprise-class, rugged devices to virtual keys on rugged next-generation devices in industrial environments is not well understood. This study utilized business-critical data entry workflows used by package delivery professionals to measure task completion time, error rates, and subjective preferences when comparing legacy physical keys to virtual keys. The study was designed to compare physical to virtual keys with data entry tasks for the same workflow without optimizing or changing the interface. The results showed that the users indicated an overall preference for the virtual keypad and exhibited faster typing speeds on the virtual keypad. The results did not show any statistical difference in total task time. Users were more likely to detect and correct their errors on a virtual keypad, but were also more likely to mistype on the virtual keypad. These initial findings show that the transition from physical to virtual keypads for package delivery workflows will not adversely impact worker productivity, and could potentially increase productivity and reduce training time.
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