When visiting a college campus, large healthcare/hospital facility, or amusement park, using digital signage, in the form of wayfinding kiosks, to figure out your current location or destination is extremely important.
When planning a large outdoor wayfinding project, it is critical to keep the message simple. With the rise in outdoor digital signage, it may be tempting ‘to make a big splash’ by incorporating fancy technology or overloading the signage with flashy and stimulating content. However, including too many elements can be overwhelming to those who are just trying to find their way around an unfamiliar place. According to Irfan Khan’s blog, ‘7 Digital Signage Trends for 2016,’ digital offers a better experience for the end user, “Digital signs are inherently more attention-grabbing than a traditional static sign. Thanks to recent technologies, digital signs can be even more engaging to customers and viewers—in fact, they can be interactive, turning viewing them into a personal experience.”
3 Tips for Using Outdoor Wayfinding
Identify Areas that Need Signage
Determine the most crucial areas that need signage. Significant areas may include the entrance or exit of a national park, noteworthy landmarks on a university campus, trendy hot spots, or a large parking garage at a hospital. It is also imperative to ensure that the digital signage, you intend on deploying, is highly visible and aesthetically pleasing to the eyes. LCDs with at least 1500 nits (if not more) is recommended for an outdoor digital signage project. Avoid using colors that are difficult to read or that may ‘bleed” into other colors or graphics, such as bright red or orange.
Functional/User Friendly
The overall goal should be to provide highly functional and easy to maintain content. In some applications, it may make more sense to use an interactive touchscreen kiosk to creatively display directories and maps. To portray the exact same information on a non-touch digital display will require a great deal of real estate, which could be more confusing for the end-user. Digital signage can also make expansion efforts stress-free. Traditional static signage is limited and does not allow for the addition of future buildings or attractions. Static signage is only as accurate as the initial installation. The beauty of digital allows for the content controller to make a change to the signage with the quick click of a button.
Keep It Simple
Finally, remember to keep the message simple and to the point. Too much content can actually be counterproductive and unclear to the user. Do not over-clutter the displays and cause the dynamic signage to become ineffective. Select an appropriately sized font based on the distance the digital signage will be viewed. Fonts and graphics that are simple to read and understand will create an easy to use digital signage solution.
Richard Slawsky, contributing writer for DigitalSignageToday.com, sums up digital signage, “Not long ago, digital signage … meant little more than flickering black-and-white TV monitors displaying flight arrivals and departures. Today, digital screens keep us informed about virtually all aspects of the travel experience, entertaining us in the process.” As technology advances, digital signage and LCD enclosure prices have greatly decreased, making it more affordable for schools, churches, businesses, museums, quick service restaurants, and hospitals (just to name a few). With digital signage, content can be updated and revised often… with very little effort. With every revision, a static sign would need to be redesigned, taken down, printed or changed, and then put back up. This could occur various times throughout a year. Digital makes content changes quite simple and keeps efficiency high!
For more information, visit our other blog posts on this subject:
5 Advantages of Deploying Outdoor, All-Weather LCD Enclosures
3 Factors that Affect Thermal Management for Outdoor LCD Enclosures
3 LCD Enclosure Trends in Transportation
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