How to Choose the Right Touchscreen for Your Business

The touchscreen smartphone, the simplicity of this tactile technology is so ingrained in individuals’ daily lives – both at work and in leisure time – that it’s difficult to recall when touchscreen tech wasn’t the norm.

With such high use on personal devices, it was inevitable that this interactive technology would eventually permeate into the workplace and more specifically the meeting room. Popularity has continued to grow and there is now a wide range of touchscreen devices on the market – let us guide you through the basic considerations of selecting a touchscreen for your business and how to choose the best screen for your space.

The Right Touchscreen for the Right Space

Touchscreens are the ultimate in meeting room collaboration tools. Acting as a digital easel or flip chart, these paperless solutions promote team engagement and problem solving. Enabling teams to work together on one document in real-time, touchscreens can enhance creativity and group participation.

Although there’s a great range of content sharing devices available that can sync to a standard flat-panel – like Barco ClickShare – and allow multiple users to share documents onscreen at once, pairing these devices with a touchscreen will give your teams even greater flexibility in a meeting.

But as with any audio visual purchase, buying the right touchscreen for your business starts with knowing your space and your team’s demands.

Touchscreens for Huddle Rooms

We’ve explored the rules of choosing the right screen size in detail here. Essentially, choosing the right screen size for the space in question starts with the 4 / 6 / 8 rule and touchscreens are no exception. This formula states that no viewer should be further away from the screen than four, six or eight times the screen height. The ‘four’ is for detailed and analytical work in which viewers are highly engaged and actively contributing; the ‘six’ is for larger text, while the ‘eight’ is right at the other end of the scale for passive viewing of presentations or films.

In a huddle room, chances are most people will be taking an active role in the meeting, engaging with the content and contributing as a team, so you should be working with the ‘four’. But at the same time the room itself will be fairly small with most people sat very close to the screen so they can make onscreen annotations and contributions. With this in mind, there usually isn’t the need for a huge screen in a huddle room and something like a 55inch screen size should work nicely.

Aside from the basic physical logic of why a smaller screen is better in a smaller room, following the basic 4 / 6 / 8 rule will help you to select a screen that isn’t going to overwhelm your meeting space. But don’t forget that getting the screen size right is only half the challenge; the second half is all about screen resolution.

The closer you are to a screen the more resolution matters, especially when you’re working with detail. With a higher density of pixels on screen, you can fit more information onto a screen without compromising the finer details of the content being displayed.

If you imagine a team sitting close to a touchscreen in a huddle room and working through multiple spreadsheets or slides, that’s a lot of very intense screen time. You need to make sure that the people working with these screens aren’t straining to see the information; by investing in a higher resolution touchscreen, even detailed content will appear crisp and sharp, making it easier for teams to stay focused and productive.

Touchscreens for the Boardroom

The 4 / 6 / 8 rule works equally well in selecting the right touchscreen size for your boardroom, but you can expect to have to spend a bit more here to get the larger screen size you’ll need for everyone in the room to be able to see the content clearly.

A boardroom really needs Full HD resolution at a minimum, whether you’re installing a traditional display screen or a touchscreen. If the budget allows it, 4K UHD will be a very welcome upgrade for teams working on detail-oriented tasks, such as reviewing and analysing the company figures.

Remember, the kind of meetings that boardrooms will need to facilitate are quite different to those of huddle rooms. While there will be some collaborative meetings, with multiple people sharing and working on content on the main display screen, these rooms will also play host to meetings led by a single person, a presenter if you like.

This flexibility in the way in which teams will be using the room needs to be accounted for in the room’s technology and in your choice of screen. Look at things from the perspective of how the board tend to work, will a lot of people take an active role or are most meetings about passive consumption of information and content as it is presented by a single person? If the room needs to accommodate both then things like multiple touchpoints will become even more important to ensure that the whole team can collaborate when required. But either way, there is a flexibility that you get with a touchscreen that encourages more creative and interactive meetings, even at board level, it’s well worth considering.

Need some help or advice?

There’s a vast array of touchscreen solutions to suit any sized meeting room, all budgets and a variety of purposes. But as with all audio visual purchases, it’s about reviewing your company’s requirements and making a personal choice as to what will work for your teams.

Projectorpoint’s experts are on hand if you’d like to discuss your choices in more detail. Alternatively, you can view the full range of touchscreens here.