[joshjn]

Hi team, I've just installed touch screens on a few POS at a client site. The cashiers like the general flow but don't like keeping the onscreen keyboard active. Is there any way to have it act similar to a mobile device where the keyboard raises on entering a text field (I.e customer name search)?

[RetailEdge Moderator]

Thanks for the suggestions. I will add it to the list. A few comments about the sales screen:

1. If you are not doing so, you really should be using the Touch Sales screen. RetailEdge has two sales screens. One is optimized for Touch with a number of buttons you can use for commonly sold items. The other is more traditional and not really designed for touch. Although I have seen customers make sales on this sales screen very fast, I typically use this sales screen when doing quotes and open orders since it allows you to see more about the items, more easily add notes to the items, change the clerks and move the order of items on the sale.

2. If you are using the touch sales screen, you should not have to use the virtual keyboard, since there is a button on the side of the items and customer look up boxes, that will allow you pop up a keyboard when you need it. This will allow you to maximize the amount of real estate on the screen since the virtual keyboard won't be sitting active on the bottom of the screen.

3. If you find that the businesses are using a keyboard a lot you might want to consider having a space where a real keyboard can be put. There are businesses that don't need to use anything other than a scanner and the buttons to ring in a sale (c-stores, quick service (QSR), etc.). There are other businesses that need to enter customer information and are using the terminals to enter product. If this is the case, then doing this with a keyboard is going to be much more efficient than tap, tap, tapping a virtual keyboard.

4. Also remember, you only have to do a partial match on lookups. Many times I see users fully typing in some long customer last name, when really they only have to enter the first 2 or 3 characters (even in the middle of the name) to find what they are looking for.

5. And finally there are some inherent issues with having a virtual keyboard automatically pop up. We have the cursor placed in the items and customer look up fields an are expecting input from a number of sources (keyboard and scanner). So we can't automatically pop up a keyboard when the focus is in that field since this may hide some buttons or other necessary parts of the screen. Actually some of the BT scanners that connect to an iPhone for physical inventory will disable that functionality when the scanner is active. So they have the same issue I think.

Anyway good suggestion and we will investigate how we might implement this without negatively impacting how other parts of the program.

Hi team, I've just installed touch screens on a few POS at a client site. The cashiers like the general flow but don't like keeping the onscreen keyboard active. Is there any way to have it act similar to a mobile device where the keyboard raises on entering a text field (I.e customer name search)?