Line-of-business apps and heavy data-entry tasks are the exception. Every enterprise is full of them. Navigating across fields/buttons using the keyboard withou

Line-of-business apps and heavy data-entry tasks are the exception. Every enterprise is full of them. Navigating across fields/buttons using the keyboard without using the mouse is a huge productivity factor in those scenarios. A good metric to use in these scenarios is effective keystrokes per hour. Several years ago we did a study while building a remittance processing system for a financial institution and found that just doing 'amount entry' (fully numeric input only) increased the effective keystrokes per hour compared to mixed mode entry. That means higher items processed per day (which translates to $$ transacted). There is a marked productivity difference between doing numeric only entry using the numpad versus the numeric key row at the top of a keyboard. The numpad is orders of magnitude faster.