Issue 81: No More Homing Time With Microsoft Surface

Today the official Microsoft Surface Twitter page reminded me of something SUPER important about ALL Surface devices and productivity! Every single surface includes a touchscreen. I don't know if any other PCs can say that every model includes touch!

Homing time is the time required to move the hands from one input device, such as the keyboard, to another, such as the mouse. I would also use this term for the time it takes you to move the pointer on your screen to some other area other than where it is and then click, double click or click and drag.

I always forget about this until I watch end users. The amount of time and energy an end user spends moving their mouse or trackpad can be seconds, but add these up over the time they are swtiching between applications, opening new applications, closing an application or a tab in a browser. There has to be a better way.

Homing time is the time required to move the hands from one input device, such as the keyboard to another. Touch does have more than one input now with soft and hard presses on our phones, long presses, etc.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/mouse-vs-fingers-input-device/ - this is where I first learned about homing time.

Imagine giving everyone a Surface Pro and teaching them when to use what for efficiency. It always amazes me how few people know about CTRL+1, CTRL+2, CTRL+3 keyboard shortcuts (try it in Outlook, Microsoft Teams or a browser with multiple tabs - what just happened?) Microsoft Teams on the desktop or browser shows the navigation pane to the far left (the list pane and content pane are the next two) - which one is quickest to slowest to switch from Teams to Chat?

1) keyboard (CTRL shortcuts shared above) 2) mouse/trackpad or 3) touching your screen on the left hand side?

You're in control of productivity with any Surface!