Mobile users are extremely important to e-commerce. According to Oberlo, they now represent 73% of all ecommerce sales.

A great pain point for mobile users is the keyboard which typically takes up half the screen space. A standard mobile keyboard layout has 40-46 keys tightly packed together. This leads to errors when typing long text or numeric sequences.

 

Specialized keyboards

You can give your customers a hand by showing specialized keyboards. These limit the number of keys by only displaying the ones that are required by a particular field. 

A name field doesn’t require numbers so you should remove them. 

Numerical fields like the credit card number, phone, or zip code don’t require letters. By only displaying a numeric keyboard, you cut down the number of buttons from around 45 to 12.

 

Benefits of specialized keyboards

Apart from simplifying typing for shoppers, specialized keyboards let a user know what kind of data is required in a certain field. If a customer sees a numeric keyboard when he taps on the zip code field, then he’ll know that numeric data is required (keep in mind that some countries like Canada use letters in their zip codes so you might want to account for that during design).

 

Be consistent

Consistency in displaying specialized keyboards is very important for user satisfaction. If you display a numeric keyboard on the credit card number field, do the same on the security code field. If you display a regular old alphanumeric keyboard, a customer will be confused as to what kind of data is required.

 

A few examples

Email keyboard:

 

Name keyboard:

 

 

Phone keyboard:

 

Credit card keyboard: