Digital Signage Media:: Interactivity Enriches Consumer Experience

From iPhones to ATMs and other self-service kiosks

, consumers are demonstrating their love affair with touch and interactivity.

I recently was having lunch with a friend who excitedly told me he had signed up to be one of the first to buy an Apple iPad. While he liked the prospect of owning a full-color tablet to access and consume all of his favorite media, what he instinctively knew he would love about the gadget is its touch-screen interface.

Already an owner of an Apple iPhone, he was well familiar with navigating his device with a simple touch, scanning through menus with the flip of his fingertip against the screen and blowing up a picture to a larger size by touching the screen with the tips of his thumb and forefinger and pulling them apart. Navigating around his new iPad in the same fun way, undoubtedly will feel comfortably familiar.

My friend is one of the millions of people around the world who today enjoy the fast, friendly feeling of control made possible through touch and interactivity. Many of these touch-screen devotees were first exposed to the concept of interacting with technology in the form of a computer mouse used to point and click through an interface to complete a desired task. (Thank you Xerox PARC for the concept of a GUI and Stanford Research Institute for the mouse). After years of whetting their appetite for this sort of interactive control over technology, it's easy to see why consumers now have a deep love affair with interactive touch-screen control.

Just look around. Touch screens are everywhere. Think about it. You likely are not going to spend more than a day before you encounter touch screen interactivity in the form of an ATM, self service kiosk, MP3 player, GPS navigation device, cell phone or even on TV in CNN's Situation Room or in the movies like "Minority Report."

Research firm DisplaySearch has quantified the popularity of touch screens. It released a report in May '09 finding about 220 million touch screens were shipped for use in mobile phones in 2008 -or 16 percent of the mobile phone market. By 2015, the research firm forecasts the penetration rate of touch screens in mobile phones will grow to about 40 percent. And that's only one slice of the interactive, touch-screen pie.

I bring this up because I am a big proponent of identifying important trends and positioning oneself to benefit from where that trend is headed. So when it comes to digital signage, professional communicators would do well to consider the potential of digital signage panels to tap into the public's love affair with touch-screen interfaces and add interactivity to their digital signs when appropriate.

Consider a large casino or hotel lobby. How much easier and efficient is it for patrons to access and staff to convey way finding information or ballroom event schedules than via interactive digital signs? Simply by automatically tapping into the booking and management software used by the hotel or casino, a digital signage controller can extract the appropriate data and create the right digital signage page before it's required. Thus, when Aunt Martha wants to find out where the chrysanthemum contest is being held, the digital signage controller has already gathered that data from the facility management software, created the page and is ready to display "Ballroom C."

Best of all, when interactive control is not required, that same digital sign can mimic a traditional digital sign and playback scheduled media to promote shops, restaurants and other amenities offered by the facility until once again being called into interactive service.

Simply by recognizing the public's fascination with interactive touch control, those designing digital signage installations can add interactivity to make any given digital sign more useful to the public and more effective in the eyes of the marketers, advertisers and other professional communicators who intend to use the sign to achieve their goals.

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