I was walking past a sushi takeaway restaurant yesterday and noticed that they were using digital signage for their menu board so I stopped and had a look at how it was implemented. They had three 32″ LCD screens with rotating menu items and the design of the menu was quite impressive but not the solution. Let me explain.

At the front of the restaurant there are 3 32″ LCD screens. Each one of them displayed menu items except for the first one. This one actually had the message “No Video Input” and for most of us we know what this means. My guess is that the device connecting to the screen was either damaged or wasn’t turned on. Now most likely if the other two were on the the first unit would most likely be damaged.

So what happens here, two of the three screens were only displaying the menu so what happens to the menu items listed in the first screen. I quickly looked around to see whether there were any other signs of a menu list… and I couldn’t find any.

So now the restaurant only has two thirds of a menu and in my point of view the business may potentially lose customers if this continued.

In this particular case, what would you have done differently if you were the consultant or installer of this particular restaurant? We definitely know that if the menu system is a critical part of the overall running of the businesses we would had a backup plan or strategy to overcome this issue. For example, we would have installed a system that would allow the restaurant owner to quickly switch the templates (via a USB numpad keyboard) so that all the menu items would be rotated on the 1 screen – basically in this case it would be shown to 2 of the three screens. Otherwise, if the LCD screens had a SD card reader, using static images to display the menu items. This  would have been better than displaying the “No Video input”.

In this particular case, what would you have done differently if you were the consultant or installer of this particular restaurant?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

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