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What I like to hear

earTypically, demoing our software/hardware takes about 10-15 minutes. I gave a demo today to an IT person at a large printing company. His first response was, “that’s it? it just works?” I love hearing that — it means that we’ve cut through the complexity and made something that…just…works. We then showed it to the receptionist who is going to be updating the content, she had a similar reaction.

They had been considering split screen, video-based content for their digital sign but are now thinking more along the lines of one thing on the screen at a time, few words, better visuals. I also like seeing that transition in thought — from Headline News to simple fullscreen poster. Information design is crucial.

If you give people Headline News/tickers/split screen, they’ll automatically dump your digital sign into the “crap don’t look” category in their head. If you give them simple, well-designed, relevant content, it goes into the “oh, what’s this, let me see if I can use this information” category. Doing the former is a waste of money, in my opinion. Uh-oh, I’m on my soap box.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 @ 9:26 pm on the category Best Design, Soap Box. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Sounds like it might be worthwhile to explain this to new customers--the simple graphics idea. Maybe even have an annual contest for great posters. I am the kind of person who likes on/off switches and not 16 different spin cycles or 16 different remote controls. You could name your prize KISS for keep it simple, stupid.

    I agree with Ross about more soap boxes. Maybe even a blog section on how to use digital signs effectively? Maybe your own customers would supply the examples?
  • Ross
    There are SO many people who think that unless your sign is showing a ticker as well as an RSS feed, video/flash/ppt all at the same time then it has no value - but having worked on building systems like that I think I've come around to your way of thinking. Not only is there the "crap' don't look" aspect to it, even if you do it either takes you far too long to decide what information on the screen you should be looking at, or just get information overload and watch the flashing lights (video) instead, which makes the rest sort of pointless.

    Trying to advertise with video seems such a bad/bizarre idea - most people are going to catch the video half way through, if that is the case then they're unlikely to hang around for the rest of it unless they are static and not moving (that some people call this a captive audience, I think, explains a lot). If people are walking past then they're seeing even less of the video and seeing so little of the message that it is pointless. At least with a 'poster' system all of the information is there in one glance, I can (probably subconciously) decide whether the information has value to me without getting information out of context - my only worry about all of these sort of things is that if the information is really interesting to me and it moves on to the next item in the playlist before I have a chance to read it fully - some way of going back to the previous item because I was reading it would be great.

    Anyway, more posts from the soap-box please ... :)

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