My Journey to Improve My Typing- Part Two

In my journey to find a website that fits my typing needs and improve my wpm and accuracy, the next website is typingtest.com.

This website claims that it “doubles your wpm”. It is more based on testing wpm and accuracy, hence the use of “test” in the name. Despite this, it still offers different activities to do to improve typing speed. On the left of the website, there are tabs with different things to do. It goes as follows: Typing Test, Typing Courses, Tricky Keys, TypeRush Race, Typing Games Zone, TypeTastic for Schools, and Tests for Recruiters. 

The courses have five different categories of lessons with 30 lessons total that you can take in any order.

There are multiple activities in each lesson that consists of how to use the website, simple teachings of how to type, and different types of practice games to get familiar with typing. There are words, sentences, and paragraphs practice. There are practice tests that get harder and longer as you go along as well. At first, I thought there was only one lesson, with seven activities within it, so I completed it and went on to explore the rest of the website. A few days later when I revisited the website I found that there were multiple lessons. One of my biggest critiques would have been the lack of lessons as practice and my review of the website would have been completely off. After finding out about the other lessons, I completed several over the course of about a week or so.

During the first lesson, I went through each lesson, doing the ones with practice games multiple times to get better at them. I then took the test and got an embarrassing result. My wpm was slower than where I had left it and I had very little accuracy. 

This caused me to go into the next thing on the sidebar which was tricky keys. It would let you practice any key in focus to get better at it. There was also a test to determine how accurate you were with each letter. I challenged myself to get each letter to 80% no matter the speed. My result in wpm for every letter averaged at about 38 words per minute, which is 2 wpm better than it was before. The lowest I had got was 22 wpm. I then took the test and got 100% with 32 wpm. 

After that, I went through the games, which actually just sent you to a different website that had typing games. The other websites had several ads and were slow. Since the games were on a different website, they aren’t really a reflection of typingtest.com. The selection of games was a wide variety. Good job on the promo of other websites.

I then found the other lessons by going back to the original lesson and clicking a giant orange arrow in the corner I somehow missed. I found all the other lessons and started going through them. When I started on this website I felt awful about my typing abilities. This was because of my low score on the test I had taken previously, my wpm was the same and my accuracy wasn’t good. But as I went through the lessons, my confidence increased and I started to grow fond of the website. I felt like I was actually learning, and getting better because the lessons start out easy and get progressively harder. So it was easy to adapt to them.

The main part of the website is the test tab. On it, you can start a test to measure your wpm and accuracy. It is also customizable with the time, difficulty of words, and dark mode or light mode. It has a variety of options that make it easier for anyone to test their skill no matter the difficulty level. There is also a benchmark test that compares you to others who have taken the benchmark test. It is based on the accuracy that is normally paired with a certain wpm. I took it and got 34 wpm with 100% accuracy. The average was 34 wpm with 94% accuracy. It wasn’t a speed I was proud of but I’m glad I kept good accuracy.

I took an easy 1-minute test and got an adjusted speed of 47 wpm when I didn’t focus on accuracy. Adjusted wpm means deducting the typos made from the original, faster wpm. My unadjusted was 50 wpm. Both are still better than what I had got when I focused on accuracy.

Something important is the layout of the website because one of the first things people notice is something visual, this includes ads. A website with an overload of ads can be very distracting and slow which is not wanted when what you are on the website for is focus and speed. This website varies on the amount of ads shown based on what aspect of the website you are using. It’s mostly not too many but at some times there are a lot. There is also an ad to watch before each lesson. Most video ads can be skipped after about five seconds. 

My closing thoughts:

1. It reuses phrases in the tests and in the lessons but it takes a while to get the same ones again. It is probably a randomized cycle. I like this because it isn’t the exact same thing every time which would cause learning only those words and not every word. It also practices with several words that I’d probably never use in my day-to-day life but it’s still good to go over them. I think it has a decent balance.
2.  It includes punctuation and capitalization in all of the tests, which I noticed when first doing a test before doing the lessons. This discouraged me because I’m very bad at those things and typing club included it after learning all the letters so I had already gotten used to typing without most of those things. Typingtest.com, however, incorporated them in lessons earlier before learning all the letters. It also teaches the letters in a different way and order than typing club, which I appreciated. It kept things different enough so I couldn’t get used to a pattern instead of just learning.
3. My favorite parts were the Motoric Warm-ups, which is just practicing how fast and accurately you can type the starred key(s) on the screen with no actual words involved, and the Tricky Keys.