Touch Screens and Spa/Salon Manager

I just finished my first cut at a standing desk and the process of working on putting together a comfortable and easy-to-use workstation reminded me of an important point we don't spend enough time talking about - from the very beginning we designed the Spa/Salon Manager program to work well with touch screen monitors.

Now any program will 'work' with a touch screen monitor. A touch screen simply allows you to replace the motions and left-click actions of a mouse by touching the screen with your finger. A mouse allows for far more control than touching a screen allows though. The design of Microsoft Windows itself shows this expectation of control - small buttons, tiny drop-down menus (File, Edit, View, etc. along the top). Most Windows versions of salon software follow that same model - they're designed to look like a Windows program. That means that unless you're very careful it's easy to miss what you're trying to click with a touch screen - the buttons are just too small and touching the screen too inexact to make the touch screen a time saver or even a comfortable option at a standing work station.

Our program isn't designed following those Windows standards that are unfriendly to a touch interface. We used a button-based menu system for all of our screens rather than Windows drop-down menus. All of these buttons are far larger than you'd find in a typical Windows program. We've made sure to avoid any small data entry boxes and as often as possible have offered drop-down boxes as an alternative to typing in information. The effect is that our program not only makes it easy to use a touch screen in place of a mouse - for many operations we avoid a need for a keyboard as well.

So who should use a touch screen? The same people that are trying to do what I'm doing right now - standing at a desk rather than sitting. While reaching toward a touch screen while seated can be cumbersome, reaching toward a touch screen while standing is often easier than using a mouse would be in that same position. I've seen some wonderful ergonomic desks built to use a touch screen - one even had the touch screen built in to a slanted standing desk similar to a podium! However you set up your ideal desk though our program is designed to make it comfortable and easy to touch the screen.