Most of us get by just fine tapping away on the iPhone keyboard, but few would describe it as a pleasure. The experience is about as good as it can get for a touchscreen keyboard of this size, but flipping through the various layouts to swap among letters, numbers, and punctuation is a tedious hassle, slowing us down and inviting mistakes. Help users stave off keyboard boredom by providing a keyboard tuned to the type of input you're asking for in each text field. There are eight different keyboard layouts bundled in the iPhone OS, each designed for a particular flavor of content, and you can associate individual text fields with any of them. Details like this matter: be sure each of your fields conjures the best keyboard for the data you want.
Unless you specifically choose a different keyboard for your text fields and views, the iPhone will give you the default keyboard, which varies according to the user's language preferences, dishing the Cyrillic alphabet for Russian or kana script for Japanese, for example. The default keyboard is just right for general-purpose text entry, but you can specify any of these targeted keyboards to ease entering particular types of info:
ASCII. This is the default keyboard for English-language users, offering the alphabet on its main keyboard, with options to switch to other layouts for numbers and punctuation. (ASCII is the name of the original set of letters, numbers, and punctuation characters used by modern computers; it doesn't include any fancy characters or non-Western script, for example.)
Numbers and punctuation. This is the same as the ASCII keyboard, but with the keyboard pre-selected to start on the numbers and punctuation layout instead of the alphabet layout.
URL. Aimed at entering web addresses, this layout includes dot, slash, and .com keys on the main keyboard, replacing the space bar. The punctuation on the keyboard's second layout is likewise tuned for characters that commonly appear in URLs (#, +, %, and so on).
Email address. The familiar @ character takes center stage on this keyboard, with common email punctuation staking out the keyboard's secondary punctuation layout.
Number pad. Zero through nine, that's all. (No Return key, so the keyboard has to be dismissed with a separate Done button elsewhere in the interface—a good idea anyway.)
Phone pad. This one's identical to the number pad, but with an additional layout for the +, #, *, and Pause keys.
Name phone pad. The main keyboard offers letters—the same as the ASCII keyboard—but the secondary layout is a modified number pad, no punctuation options.
In addition to choosing the appropriate keyboard style, you can also customize the Return key label for each input field's keyboard. "Return" is the standard setting for the key, but where appropriate, you can use the text of the key to signal exactly what will happen next, yet another way to orient your audience about the purpose of the text field. There are several standard label alternatives to choose from, and all except "Next" shift the button color to blue to signal that something special will happen when tapped:
