The Power of Touch in the Modern Workplace

Have you ever reached out and tapped on a device screen or monitor only to be disappointed to discover that it’s not a touch screen? Touch is such a natural and intuitive way to manipulate what’s on our screens that it’s pretty jarring these days when we encounter a screen that only lets us use traditional buttons, keyboards, or mice.

Fortunately this experience is becoming less common as touch screens become an expected feature on all of our personal computing devices—including the PCs, monitors, and devices we use at work. Gartner says that we will have over 2.5 billion touch-enabled devices in use in 2015.1  And their popularity continues to grow.

Touch and the Modern Workplace

I love the touch-enabled systems I use at work. They make it amazingly easy to scroll through files, activate icons, zoom in and out of documents, and markup presentations. If you asked me to choose between touch or a traditional keyboard and mouse, I don’t know if I could give you a favorite.

It’s so natural and intuitive to switch between old-school and touch inputs that I don’t even think about it. I automatically do what feels the most efficient and comfortable for the task at hand.

For me, this makes my daily work tasks feel more personal, more comfortable, more efficient, and honestly, a little more fun.

Touch Greater Productivity

Touch in the workplace also helps workers be more productive. Touch screen PCs, like Intel processer-based All-in-Ones, for example, give teams easy drawing, note-taking, and mark-up capabilities that provide a huge boost to creative collaboration. Plus, being able to instantly choose the input mode that best fits an activity helps streamline tasks and workflows.

This added productivity ultimately helps businesses save money. In fact, if a worker gets even 1 minute per day in added productivity from a touch-enabled All-in-One PC upgrade (a pretty conservative estimate, in my opinion), that boost would pay back the additional cost of the device within 20 months.2

Touch Is Everywhere

Touch screens are also helping to modernize customer-facing solutions like point-of-sale and self-service kiosks. And with more touch devices showing up in the workplace, popular applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint have been optimized for touch. Intel-based All-in-One PCs also support 10-finger multi-touch controls that allow several people to use touch screen functions at once, making collaboration activities like marking up documents or designing quick sketches even more efficient.

The power of touch is revolutionizing collaboration, productivity, and the workplace. It has certainly changed how I work, and I don’t think I could go back to being without it. Thankfully, it appears that touch for business devices is here to stay.

For more information about all the benefits of touch in today’s workplace, download the infographic.

1. http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/global-device-shipments-to-touch-25-billion-units-in-2015-gartner-644825
2. March 2015, A Principled Technologies Report Commissioned by Intel: Change Your Desktops, Change Your Business.