Your Digital Signage MUST Be Scalable & Responsive. Here’s Why

There’s a lot to consider when adopting a digital signage system, from the installation of the hardware, choosing the right system provider, and everything in between. With so many moving parts, efficiency is crucial! Ensuring your content is reliably flexible, reusable, and consistent across all of your digital touchpoints will reduce downtime, increase visibility, and grant you peace of mind.

By taking some initial considerations into account, your digital content can do quite a bit of this work for you, by being both scalable and responsive. Here are some things to consider when designing for your digital signage.

Leave Room for Scaling

Whether your content will appear on one screen or one hundred, you will want to think about how it will scale - or change size. How large is the display where this content will be shown? Would the same content be used on other displays of different sizes, screen orientations, or in different locations? Do these areas have different visibility needs that should be considered? How far away will displays be from customers or clients who will be reading them? All of these questions can affect the scale of your design and how much information you might want to show on screen at one time.

If your screen sizes are on the small side, you might want to avoid using a lot of text that would be difficult to read. If your screens are much larger, you may be able to fit more words, but should avoid overwhelming your customers. Rather than creating - and managing - many different pieces of content with minor differences for every possible screen configuration, a single piece of content can be designed to work for most, or all, of your screen sizes. The same is true for adding brand new displays; a scalable design should be able to be deployed to other displays without the need to go through a costly content redesign. Not everything will be able to be perfectly scalable, but thoughtful design can cover a good portion of your requirements!

Thinking through these simple possibilities can help minimize the number of different pieces of content you will need to create and manage, avoid potential issues of legibility, and decrease downtime when needing to edit or update your content across your various digital channels.

Be Flexible with Responsive Content

Our lives are increasingly dominated by our devices, and those devices are increasingly interconnected with each other. Websites, streaming video, and apps are designed to look the same whether viewed on a phone, laptop, tablet, or high-definition display. This concept of Responsive Design also applies to your on-site digital signage.

Whether your content is full-screen video or simple text-based tables, you want it to be displayed properly on all of the different screen orientations and resolutions they may be viewed on. Those screens can vary from digital signage arrays, single-screen message boards, touchscreen kiosks, tablets, and more. Many of these devices can be oriented either horizontally or vertically, which (quite literally) adds another dimension to ensuring maximum flexibility and consistency.

Responsive design takes these multiple resolutions in mind from the start of the design process, and will automatically resize, reorder, or reorient individual elements based on the viewer’s channel. In this way, one piece of content can display simultaneously on a large horizontal monitor and also on a vertical tablet, despite both screens being very different in size. Some CMS ecosystems allow further customization, and will give your content the ability to take up only half a screen, or to span across two or more adjacent screens. With a little bit of planning, you can utilize the principles of responsive design to develop content that does the hard work for you.

Update Your Playlists Frequently

Once you’ve made sure that your content is responsive and your digital signage is scalable, update your playlists with fresh content regularly. The time and money saved by responsive content can be reinvested into new and exciting marketing initiatives and pieces of content. Keeping things fresh ensures that your customers stay engaged with your messaging, even if they are familiar with your branch or location.

In the event that your digital signage system expands for new locations or adding displays at any existing location, existing content should be able to work on those displays as well. Your content management system (CMS) should allow you to manage all of your screens from one simple interface. If you follow the above tips, put a little forethought into considering your content, and leverage the flexibility of your digital display and CMS, you can ensure peace of mind knowing that any content will display correctly on any kind of screen it will be viewed on.