Touch Devices for BusinessA guide for IT and line-of-business managers

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The Power of TouchIn the span of a few short years, touch-based user interfaces have become an integral part of how people interact with their personal devices.

With the combination of innovative new device form factors and an amazing array of touch-controlled apps, it is no surprise that workers want the same convenience, immediacy, and mobility they get from their personal touch-enabled tablets, smartphones, and PCs when they’re in the workplace.

Many IT and line-of-business (LOB) managers see touch arriving in their organizations through the front door on users’ personal devices instead of from a management decision. And businesses find themselves at crossroads with touch similar to where their predecessors were in the 1980s when faced with figuring out whether and how PCs could benefit their enterprises.

This guide will explore the why, where, and how of touch in business, including ways in which users, organizations, and the IT industry are using it for greater productivity. IT and LOB managers will find trends, lessons, background information, and data points with which they can equip themselves in upcoming discussions about integrating touch computing and devices into their own workflows.

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Key Points

Because of its potential to boost worker productivity and collaboration, touch is fundamental to the future of enterprise computing. Just as employees increasingly expect employers to support touch, employers are also beginning to expect touch proficiency from employees.

With more business applications available and more smart businesses accommodating touch computing in their IT environments, deploying or purchasing non-touch-enabled devices is potentially a short-sighted business strategy.

2 in 1s, Ultrabooks™, and Windows* 8.1 apps are gaining prominence as the optimal hardware-software combination for business productivity with touch screen, keyboard, and touchpad input modes.

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The Whys

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Why touch is so popularTens of millions of smartphone and tablet users have proven the potential of small-form-factor touch devices to radically alter the personal computing landscape.

Touch is now ripe to leap to the larger computing platforms and revolutionize business computing as well for a number of compelling reasons:

Touch is instinctive and immediate. To supplement visual perception, humans instinctively want to manipulate things by touching them. And unlike a mouse, touchpad, or joystick, using a touch screen does not place another abstract device between the eye, the hand, and what is being interacted with on screen. In addition, no new motor skills need to be learned to use the input device.

Touch complements other input modes. Touch is a big step toward multimodal interfaces and one of a growing number of input modes—keyboard, mouse, and touch combined with gesture, voice, and machine vision—that users can choose from to optimize their interactions with their devices.

Touch technology has matured. The decades of research and investments in the hardware and software behind making touch computing possible have yielded highly accurate and responsive touch interfaces. Meanwhile, a critical mass of device technologies and OS innovations are resulting in cost-effective touch computing becoming available across a full spectrum of devices.

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Why touch will not displace other input modesTouch is not ideal for every task. There are some tasks where a keyboard, mouse, or other input mode just works better than touch. For example, tasks that involve inputting or working with large amounts of text or data can be done with touch, but are simply more efficient with traditional modes. Likewise for many precision tasks such as editing video.

Touch computing introduces new ergonomic factors. The angle and distance of the screen when using a touch device or PC can affect comfort. Prolonged use—especially when the arm is raised—can potentially cause fatigue. However, the ability to shift among touch and other modes can help users remain comfortable.

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The Wheres

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Where touch devices can boost productivity in businessesRetail: In-store employee tools for inventory information, training videos, display illustrations, and sales materials

Mobile point of sale: Simpler, less expensive, and more flexible alternative to cash registers and traditional retail point-of-sale devices

Sales and marketing: Presentations, face-to-face customer interaction, trade shows, and digital brochures

C-suite: Dashboards for real-time business intelligence data to help monitor and manage performance across the organization

Customer relationship management (CRM): Monitoring tools for customer-facing campaigns, contact center activity, and customer feedback in social media

IT administration: Real-time, remote network monitoring and mobile access to troubleshooting knowledge base

Workforce management: Human resource administration, employee training, instruction, and signatures on electronic documents

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Where touch devices can boost productivity in businesses (cont.)Meetings: Note-taking, team collaboration, and sketching out ideas

Big data: Dashboards for viewing post-computation analysis of large amounts of data

Creative: Stylus-based apps for early UI sketches, storyboards, diagrams, and rough visuals

Healthcare: Mobile supplements to hospital workstations to improve workflow for constantly moving clinicians

Military and defense: Analysis of video feeds and real-time command/control for officers in the field

Commercial aviation: Digital replacements for paper versions of flight maps, manuals, and continuous updates

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Where touch alone won’t sufficeFor many job roles and work tasks, touch will likely work best as a complement to other input methods.

Design and layout: Tasks that require pixel-perfect precision require the finer control of a mouse or stylus.

Writing and editing: Touch can help, but with familiar keys, commands, and shortcuts, keyboard and mouse are still the best tools for documents.

Data and code: Working with spreadsheets, data fields, and lines of code is still more efficient using a keyboard and mouse.

Video and photo editing: Touch controls bring some added convenience, but a keyboard, mouse, or stylus still offer video and photo editors the greatest productivity.2 in 1s—the best of both worldsIntel® processor-based 2 in 1 devices give users the convenience and touch of a tablet with the performance and features of a business laptop in a single device. With a flip of the screen, a 2 in 1 quickly switches between tablet and laptop modes to give users the best tool for the task at hand.

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The Hows

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How touch makes a difference in businessBrainstorming and collaboration: Touch devices reduce physical obstacles to collaboration and help people share information in a more natural way. They offer the immediacy and openness of collaborating on paper or a whiteboard along with the digital support—consistency, Internet access, and storage—of electronic devices. Touch enables meeting participants to engage directly with content on the screen rather than having one person in control of the keyboard or mouse.

Sales force automation: Touch brings immediacy and interactivity to sharing and presenting promotional materials, sales collateral, product videos, and slide decks with prospects at the point of decision. In a survey by Dimensional Research, nearly half of responding businesses reported demand in their organizations for sales force automation on tablets.1

Business intelligence: While most touch devices do not lend themselves to compute-intensive database operations, they are ideal for displaying the dashboards, analysis, and reports that come from the data—enabling decision makers to monitor and take action based on current data, no matter where they are.

Meetings: Touch devices foster greater engagement and more fruitful collaboration, enabling attendees to write, draw, highlight, modify, move, and zoom objects on screen. Plus, the ideas and notes from the meeting are easy to save and share—unlike with a whiteboard.

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How users use touch at workIntel usability testing on touch-enabled Ultrabooks™ revealed some interesting insights into how people engage with touch for common workplace tasks such as creating a Microsoft Office PowerPoint* slide or writing an email message.

Testing results demonstrated:• 77% of participants used the touch screen when it was an option.

• Most shifted between input modes—touch screen, keyboard, mouse, and touchpad—depending on the task.

• Users had a higher level of comfort being able to switch between modes.

• They reported that touch made work seem more like play.

• They had a preference for a touch-enabled Ultrabook over the combination of tablet and wireless keyboard.2

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How the tech industry is advancing touchInnovations and investments by hardware and software companies—and an army of software developers—have rapidly improved the touch experience to the point where today’s touch devices can truly be called business-ready.

Intel and Microsoft

Touch-enabled Ultrabooks™, 2 in 1s, tablets, and all-in-one PCs with the latest Intel® processors giver users the performance and features they need to get more work done—combined with the convenience and flexibility of touch.

Touch devices running Windows* 8.1 offer a familiar computing environment across devices, can run the latest touch-optimized software such as Microsoft Office 365*, and have the compatibly to run existing legacy applications and peripherals.

Both Intel and Microsoft are helping to foster the creation of the next generation of touch apps for business with a wealth of resources, guides, and developer support in the Intel Developer Zone (http://software.intel.com) and Microsoft Dev Center (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps).

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How business is making touch workMany smart businesses are embracing touch and taking advantage of the mobility and convenience that touch devices offer their employees.

Hardware: A range of business-grade touch devices with Intel® Core™ vPro™ processors inside—2 in 1 devices, tablets, all-in-one PCs, and Ultrabooks™—offer the performance, features, and touch that users want along with the security, compatibility, and manageability that the business and enterprise IT needs.

Software: Microsoft Windows* 8.1 is designed for touch with features and commands that give users control at their fingertips. And touch-optimized applications, such as Microsoft Office 365* and OneNote* let users enhance their productivity with touch while experiencing the familiar Desktop environment and file compatibility across a range of devices running Windows 8.1.

Virtual Desktop Interfaces (VDI): As an interim measure, some companies configure touch devices with virtual desktop interface (VDI) software that allows workers to see and control their PC (or a virtual PC) from anywhere using touch. However, the usability and productivity are not the same as with fully touch-enabled apps and devices.

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Source: Why, Where, and How Is Touch Right for Your Business? A Guide for IT and Line-of-Business Managers. http://www.prowesscorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Why_Touch_for_Business.pdf

1. Dimensional Research sponsored by Model Metrics. “Enterprise iPad And Tablet Adoption: A Survey.” May 2011. http://www.modelmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/iPadSurvey-May10.pdf

2. Intel. “The Winning Combination of Keyboard and Touch for Ultrabooks.” November 2012. http://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/876_Ultrabooks_Touch-and-Keyboard_v3_for-PDF.final_.pdf

Copyright © 2014, Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. Intel, the Intel logo, Intel Core, Intel vPro, the Look Inside. logo, Look Inside., and Ultrabook are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

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