Written by Guest Blogger: Nadia Jones

Every sign has a purpose. Of course, some have more than others. The trend of using digital signage has become so rampant these days that many businesses and institutions, in my opinion, are getting them before even considering why they need them. Digital signs are awesome. But there’s nothing more cringe-inducing or face-palming than seeing a digital sign that offers no more variation or usability than a sign composed of a piece of paper and a Sharpee.

Schedules, Updates, and More Schedules

This should go without saying, but any sign or outpost that contains many schedules that are updated daily would be a perfect use of digital signage. Buildings with good numbers of conferences and institutions that hold a lot of meetings (such as universities) are prime candidates for digital signage. For conferences and lectures in particular, these digital signs can be helpful not only in updating time and locations of events, but also in providing descriptions and advertising for these types of events.

Of course any public transportation company or service should and probably is using digital signs; not using this technology in a field or situation that relies on relaying constant updates to customers is simply inexcusable. Maybe five years ago that sort of thing would be ok, but not this decade.

Pretty Pictures, Even videos!

If you feel like your signs could have a lot of digital media to offer, be them pictures or especially video, digital signage would work absolutely perfectly for your needs. For pictures and graphics, digital signage works great because it gives you an excellent quality image that you can then reuse or change without having to pay extra printing fees like you would for physical prints. Dollar for dollar, when you take into account long term costs of high quality prints, digital signage will always be cheaper and usually look better too.

For video, the need for digital signage is obvious. Frankly put, there is simply no other way to convey video through a sign without digital signage. Now, audio can get a bit more complicated, but it all depends on what you’re using to host the media for the sign.

Touch Media, Oh My!

While this technology is still pretty new and therefore expensive, touch signs can be a godsend for your digital signage needs. Particularly if you intend the sign to be used for information-getting and navigational purposes, having a touch-screen sign makes it so that you can offer a lot of information in one place without having it all cluttered and bunched together. Touch screen is definitely the future of digital signage.

About the Guest Blogger:

This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at online college about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, movie related topics.

Category: Digital Signage Guest Posts

In this current day and age, quite a number of technologies are now using touch screens.  For example, gaming consoles such as the Nintendo DS, Mobile phones (iphone, blackberry storm, various PDA’s) are all using some form of touch screen technology to further increase the interaction between the user and the device.

Why interact with digital signage?

The main reason why businesses would want to interact with their customers through digital signage are:

• To provide targeted and specific information to the viewer e.g. Medical surveys whilst conducting eye sight tests.

• Traffic analytics – to understand how many people interact with the system. One system that I could think of is a Health Checking system. A weight scale connected to a digital signage system could potentially be setup to perform the following:

- The system will request for the persons age and then it will measure and display their weight

- Based on the information gathered, the system will then display the recommended weight and potential health related problems associated to the persons weight.

- Obviously at the same time, there will be an area for advertising and this space can be sold to businesses in the health industry.

• Any form of relationship requires a two way communication – to connect and build a strong relationship with your customers or clients you need to basically involve them in the decision making process. So if it’s to buy a new car, a digital signage signage solution at the car dealership should have the ability for the potential buyer to modify the colour or shape of the car as this can influence their purchasing decision.

So now the question is whether you should use touch screens in your current digital signage deployments. We cannot provide you with the answer to this question but what is important is to understand what the clients requirements are and then to assess whether a touch screen meets these requirements, but most importantly if you are planning to use touch screen technology in your digital signage solution, make sure you thoroughly look into the system usability i.e how can people interact with the system. Here are some examples from a youtube user that shows unusable touch screen systems – she refers to them as the “Usability Hall of Shame”:

For more Digital Signage videos visit the Digital Signage Portal.

My prediction is that touch screens will become part of the standard deployment for any future digital signage projects as we have seen touch screens mainly used for way finding, product catalogs, directories and gaming but is this all digital signage touch screens can be used for?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Blog Video