Texting satisfaction: does age and gender make a difference?

This study investigated the effect of age and gender on mobile phone users’ texting satisfaction, focusing on text entry factors. Structured questionnaire interviews were used to interview 18 subjects of both genders, aged between 17–37 years. Analysis of variance was computed. Gender effect was found on the speed of text entry method (p = 0.027), with the females being more satisfied than males. Age has a significant effect on navigation (p = 0.026) and learnability (p < 0.001), with the younger groups being more satisfied than the older groups. A significant interaction was found between age and gender for learnability (p = 0.039), with a clear difference between genders in the twenties and thirties. Results suggest that age and gender affect users’ texting satisfaction, with varying text entry factors. Results obtained can be used to improve text entry methods by (i) catering to local dialects (ii) reducing key overloading or introducing a better method for text entry. It is concluded that texting satisfaction awaits improvements to the text entry methods.