The following is an excerpt from “A major obstacle to PDF editing on tablet and mobile devices,” an industry guide which surveyed nearly 300 people about how they review and edit PDFs on different devices.
The previous post asked if digital PDF editing workflows are the reason why most offices struggle to go paperless. Now, we’re asking how can a reluctance to use tablets for document workflows be explained?
The survey found that many people are put off by the experience of writing on tablets with a stylus. 81% of people said they don’t edit or work with documents using a stylus. This is critical. Think about how many parts of the document review process rely on the stylus – digital signatures, text comments, and highlighting, to name a few.
A quarter of respondents described the experience of editing documents with a stylus as poor, while the majority (48.15%) say it’s merely satisfactory.
The main issue people reported with using a stylus was speed and efficiency. Nearly half of people surveyed said it slowed them down compared to working with pen and paper. Poor quality markup was the next major issue, followed by delayed responses.
Improving tablet adoption rates
The best way to increase adoption rates of editing PDFs on a tablet is to offer users a PDF file editor with an enhanced stylus experience. For too many people using a stylus to write on a PDF can be slow and awkward. It’s frustrating when annotations lag or end up in the wrong spot. How you annotate a PDF using a stylus should be seamless.
A better stylus experience involves smooth inking and faster response times, so the stylus experience feels more like marking up documents with a pen.
The benefits of improved tablet adoption are:
- Organizations using tablets can benefit from new technologies and innovation in areas like PDF editing
- Staff will have access to a tool that helps them do their job better and, in less time, than it usually takes
- Organizations and IT departments can see a better return on investment in tablets
- Staff can work efficiently in any environment – improving the review and collaboration processes
- Turnaround times are shortened since work can be done on the go
Fill out the form to continue reading the guide, which explains why digital editing and approval workflows are less common on mobile devices.