Effects of Text Input Latency on Performance and Task Load

The latency of a text editor describes how long it takes from pressing a key to the corresponding letter appearing on the screen. It is well known that high latency affects how quickly authors can write and edit texts. In order to quantify the effects of latency on users’ performance and task load, we conducted a study in which 31 participants had to re-type or correct provided texts with a physical keyboard. Each participant completed each task once with a low latency of 20 ms and once with a high latency of 200 ms. We found that latency had no significant effect on users’ performance during the copy task, but correcting texts was affected significantly by high latency. Additionally, our results suggest that fast typers are more likely to notice latency than slow typers. Our findings regarding the effects of text input latency on users’ performance contributes to the existing body of research on latency in interactive systems.