Average Inter-Keypress time when typing
I have tried to google for answers to this, but perhaps there isn't widely available research or perhaps I'm not using the right terms.
Basically, I would like to have some idea as to the average time it takes between key presses when typing. The reason I want to know this is I'm working on a fuzzy search that would be used in a drop down. There are some things we can do to improve accuracy in our results but they would result in slower speed. However, if such a speed would still be below a reasonable threshold for inter-keypress times, it makes sense to implement the change.
Any help would be appreciated.
Answer
These would vary between character pairs and would also be a function of the typing speed. For example, a person that types 60 WPM (where words are an average of five chars), is typing 360 characters per minute (which includes spaces between words, but excludes punctuation). This is about six characters per seconds which gives us an average inter-character time of 167 ms. However, this is just an average, it will be higher or lower for different character combinations.