WireSpring Blog

Making great digital signage content: Motion, silhouettes and animation

Author: Bill Gerba on 2008-05-07 18:38:57

Color, contrast, a simple message and a strong call to action. These things are all important, and they each need to be understood in your quest to create effective digital signage content. But the techniques we've mentioned so far would all be common knowledge to the workaday graphic designer at an agency or even a print shop. We've yet to talk about anything unique to our digital medium. So today, we'll focus on one of the most important differences between digital signs and static signs -- namely, the ability to show moving images. While you may think that having an object move on screen would make it more eye catching and more memorable, the opposite can also be true. In fact, poorly-planned motion can decrease visibility and readability, making your content less effective.

7 things to keep in mind when using motion

Fortunately, there are a few tips and tricks you can use to avoid such problems. As you'll see, they're basically extensions of the best practices we've discussed in past articles. To begin with, consider these seven key points:

1. Just because you can make it move doesn't mean that you should. Chances are, the out-of-home environment where your digital screens are located already has a lot of visual clutter. This is true for retail stores, health clubs, airports and practically everywhere else. Adding motion to multiple screen elements may not make them any more noticeable or visible from a distance. So far we've only found this to be true in very cluttered environments, but you'll have to try it in your own venues to be sure.
   
   
2. Don't let motion interfere with readability or comprehension. This one's easy: if you're relying on text to get your message across, and the motion you've added makes the text harder to read, your content's performance is going to suffer.
   
   
3. You get only 1.5 - 3 seconds of full attention for glance media. Thus, any period when important text or other critical message components are off the screen is potentially a missed opportunity to connect.
   
   
4. Leave enough time to read the text. Don't trust your own judgment -- if you're the designer, find somebody who hasn't seen the content before and make them read it. If they can't read your message at least three times in the alloted amount of time, either take out some text or leave it on screen longer.
   
   
5. Treat moving text like it's not there at all. I'm not talking about a slight jiggle or flash here and there, but if you have content whirring across the screen from left to right, nobody's going to be able to read it -- or at least, not all of it. So if you really want to make sure there's enough time to read your text, don't count your transition times towards the amount of time you're leaving it on screen.
   
   
6. Motion on the periphery is more subtle than motion in the middle of the field of view. A small animation on the border of your screen will exaggerate the eye's natural left-to-right sweeping motions as it reads along. Putting animation in the middle of the screen next to text will pull the eye away from the text during these natural eye motions, which are known as saccades.
   
   
7. The most important features of your spot should be static. If you have an easily-recognized or well known logo, a common catch phrase or slogan, or some trademark imagery, keep it on screen for the full length of the clip. That way, even people who don't get the chance to see the clip in its entirety will still be able to associate what they've seen with your brand or core message.

Using moving silhouettes to your advantage

One of the most useful tools we've found for understanding the impact of motion on readability is what we call silhouette, or the relative contrast patterns of moving images. Because our peripheral vision is only really good at picking out shapes and outlines, we naturally identify items that we're not directly looking at by their contrast against the background. Thus, you could say that a moving image's silhouette is the only thing noticeable about elements in a viewer's periphery. Moving elements that have a strong and easily-identifiable silhouette will take fewer cognitive resources to identify than those with less recognizable silhouettes. Of course, a silhouette profile of a moving element will change as that object moves, so it's important to make sure that simple motions are exaggerated and lines are kept as clean as possible during the movement. Consider the following:


Most viewers with average vision will have no problem discerning these images when looking directly at the content. But for customers merely glancing at it (or even subconsciously watching it in their periphery), all they will see are object outlines -- especially when objects on the screen are moving. Consequently, the image on the left will be much more "recognizable" at-a-glance because of its strong silhouette. This is true even though the image on the right uses a distracting attention vampire that would normally suck attention away from other elements when viewed head-on. Plus, silhouettes aren't just important for getting people to notice your content from the periphery. Moving images with a strong silhouette can be also moved, scaled or rotated without significantly reducing comprehension time for direct onlookers. So, your fancy visual effects will have less negative impact on readability and comprehension if they modify elements with an easily discernible silhouette.

Next week, we'll put together everything we've learned so far while examining the last critical component of any good digital signage spot: the scene composition. Just as each shot in a well-crafted movie is carefully laid out on camera, so too must our ads and announcements be arranged to form a cohesive product.

Perhaps you agree with all this academic stuff. Or maybe you've got your own ideas about how to make content great. Either way, leave a comment and let us know what you think about using motion in digital signage.

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Is the digital profiling of in-store shoppers a recipe for privacy disaster?

Author: WireSpring on 2008-05-07 08:23:07

Laura Davis-Taylor asks the following over at RetailWire:

Gaze tracking technology is becoming a very exciting option for providing shopper insights such as how many people walked by a screen or display, how many looked, at what and for how long. This is true progress for the Marketing-at-Retail space, as it opens the door to real-time analytics that allow us to respond according to what works - and what doesn't.

As exciting as this new technology is, there is an active strategic debate around it. Media buyers indeed want this valuable information to help them plan their media exposures within retail stores. However, privacy sensitivity has increased over the years and this new method of tracking may not sit well with them. Do Not Call and Do Not Mail lists are alive and well in many states and DM News has recently been reporting on the proposed Do Not Cookie bill. This points to less - not more - tolerance around personal privacy in other channels.

Should in-store marketers install gaze tracking systems that profile shopper demographics or is it opening Pandora's Box to a privacy backlash?

Our take:

WireSpring's Bill Gerba contributed a response to the question, as follows:

The collection of the data is fine if a shopper has given consent to be tracked, but the logistics of keeping track of who has agreed and who hasn't in-store are very tough to solve right now, even if you use some kind of token or RFID-based system.

The bigger problem is that retailers have proven more or less inept at data security, so any private information collected is virtually certain not to remain private for long.

Retailers can't even keep credit card data safe. Why would we think they could do a better job with an even larger volume of data (and one without any current government oversight or industry regulation a'la PCI, no less)?

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Making great digital signage content: Use contrast to your advantage

Author: Bill Gerba on 2008-04-30 18:11:09

When we make a substantial change to a piece of content, we expect it to have an equally substantial effect on how the content is perceived by viewers. But if this relationship fails to hold, as we saw in last week's article about color, it can be rather confusing to decide what comes next. After all, agencies around the world spend countless hours making sure that their ads conform to brand style guides and best practices, matching fonts, colors and animated effects against a list of approved choices. Surely it's not all in vain, right? To some extent, I'd argue it is. While consistent visual design is important for presenting a unified face to consumers across multiple channels, the recommendations you see in the corporate style guide aren't necessarily the best ones for helping viewers notice and remember your message -- especially if your message is coming across on a medium or in a venue that wasn't considered when those best practices were first established.

Concept, style, and the path to "good enough"

Unfortunately, figuring out the combination of visual elements, styles, and colors that will elicit the best possible response is next to impossible. For starters, you would have to test a huge number of variations. Next, as long as different people continue to think and act differently, you (the designer) will come up against the law of diminishing returns once your content is "good enough" for most people. But what's the quickest path to "good enough," since even getting that far might take more time than you care to invest?

After a lot of research, we've concluded that there are basically two kinds of changes you can make: concept changes and style changes. Here's an example: A concept change would be deciding whether or not to use the pink bunny in your Energizer spot. However, a style change would be deciding whether to have it on a black background or a white one (gross simplifications here, but hey, these posts tend to run on too long as it is). Aside from a few high-level generalizations, there's no way I could possibly tell you what the right concept for your brand/product/category is. That decision usually gets made by people high up the corporate ladder as part of an overall strategy or campaign. But what I can talk about, after lots of trial-and-error testing, are some important style changes to try out -- particularly style changes that affect the contrast of your images.

Adding contrast to the mix

As we alluded to last week, one of the first things that designers try to tweak (whenever possible) is the color scheme of the content. Admittedly, there are cases where tiny changes in a color or gradient can really improve the aesthetics of a piece, whether it's on TV, in print or on a digital sign. But as it turns out, contrast, not color, is far more important when it comes to getting your content noticed, watched, and remembered. Because digital signs -- whether LCDs, LEDs or plasma displays -- all emit light (as opposed to regular posters which reflect ambient light), their ability to show contrasting colors actually changes with a person's viewing angle. Thus, if somebody glances at your screen but doesn't see it head-on, they might miss the bright colors and clever imagery that you're using. In the worst case, all they'll be able to see are the outlines between light and dark areas. I think that's why changing the contrast of different visual elements can have such a significant impact on the overall readability and recall of digital signage content.

Not surprisingly, Clear Channel and other billboard companies have done a significant amount of research on which color combinations are easiest to see and read, and we've found that their conclusions hold up extremely well for indoor digital signs too. For example, consider these four color combinations:


Overlapping areas of complementary colors (for example, red and green) are difficult to focus on because our brains tend to interpret the different wavelengths of light that they use as slight vibrations. This makes the text harder to read and other visual elements harder to distinguish. Likewise, overlapping colors with a similar color value (brightness) will be difficult to distinguish for most people (and virtually impossible for the color blind). This problem is worse on LCD screens, which have the most trouble maintaining high-contrast imagery when the viewer isn't standing more or less directly in front of the screen. To maximize exposure and guarantee that signs are noticed and read, Clear Channel also makes a few recommendations, including this palette of 14 high-contrast color schemes for use in outdoor billboards:


Black and yellow provide the most bang-for-your-buck when you're designing out-of-home ads, even though black-and-white would be a higher contrast choice. The reason has to do with the physiology of the eye as well as the context where the ads are seen: Since black and yellow have both different hues (colors) and values (brightnesses), the eye readily distinguishes between them using both its rods (brightness detectors) and cones (color detectors).  From a context perspective, yellow is less prevalent than white in the typical outdoor environment, so yellow content tends to be more eye catching. Content creation for digital signage is essentially a constant struggle between getting noticed and getting remembered. Thus, the small tradeoff in readability by using less-contrasting yellow instead of white can be justified by the greater chance of grabbing a viewer's attention in the first place.

How better contrast buys you more impressions

The contrast between foreground and background can have a big impact on how easy it is to decipher content on the screen. In some cases, even a minor tweak (like increasing the contrast between foreground and background by 10%) can make the content recognizable to a much larger potential audience, since people can see it from a wider angle. Contrast also has a direct impact on readability, which in turn influences how well viewers will recall your content. So, make sure to consider what your spots look like to people across the aisle, down the hall, or on the other side of your lobby. What looks spectacular on your monitor 18" away may be indecipherable if you move back a few feet or turn your head by just a few degrees.

Next week, we'll delve into another area where contrast is critical: separating out moving elements so your viewers can focus on the important part of your message. One of the big advantages of digital displays is their ability to show moving images. But believe it or not, using motion doesn't always make content more eye catching. We'll investigate how to include the right amount of movement when we talk about silhouettes, our term for contrast-in-motion.

Meanwhile, if you have any tips on how to create high-contrast content while keeping the style guide police at bay, leave a comment and let me know!

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Making great digital signage content: Does color matter?

Author: Bill Gerba on 2008-04-23 07:51:49

Quick: what's your favorite color? I bet the answer popped into your head before you even had a chance to think about it. Color is funny like that -- though we frequently can't explain why, we tend to have preferences for certain ones over others. Some of our color preferences may change with the fashion and design trends of the day. Others may remain with us throughout life. Some are born out of patriotism or nostalgia, while others come from memories with strong emotional attachments. Whatever the cause, there's no doubt that colors can grab our attention, make us stop in our tracks and even play to our emotions. But does that mean that color can change the way that digital signage content works?

There are many conflicting views about how colors affect our physiology and psychology. While researchers have proven that colors can alter moods and even raise blood pressure, most viewers aren't going to pay enough attention to the typical content clip running on a digital sign to feel the full effect of this (versus, say, looking at art or even watching a 30-minute TV program). Thus we're forced to look for more subtle ways that colors can influence our behaviors. While I could posit my own theories on this, the folks at Mohawk (yes, the flooring/carpeting manufacturer) have already done the heavy lifting for us. In fact, C.B. Whittemore posted part of Mohawk's guide to color on her Flooring the Consumer blog, along with four other posts about the power of whites, patterns, neutrals and eco-inspired colors. I've paraphrased their more interesting findings here and combined them with some other details that we've compiled over time: Many of these color relationships may seem obvious to you, but there are some important caveats to keep in mind. While some colors evoke near-universal symbolism (green and yellow in particular), others may have different connotations in different cultures. For example, a white wedding dress is usually preferred in the US (evoking purity), but a red dress may be the ideal choice in China (signifying good luck). Also, even the most pronounced effects are fairly minimal and fleeting, like the idea of using red to set a viewer on edge. And of course, no matter how much research you do, different colors will mean different things to different people. We've each built up a unique body of experiences during the course of our lives, and this often trumps any larger societal associations or fashion trends.

So what do we recommend then? Despite all of the theory floating around, we've seen no over-arching relationship between color and content performance for glance-type digital signage. There were some unique cases where changing a clip's color may have altered its performance, but at this point I don't feel like there's any predictable or reproducible way to see the effect. In my book, that means the correlation between color and recall performance either doesn't exist, is too small to be noticed, or is too difficult for us to manipulate properly.

With that in mind, I'd say that color can safely be used to meet the brand/style requirements of your venue or advertiser, fit into your venue's "clean store policy" (if they have one), or meet any other marketing or aesthetic goal -- all without impacting performance too severely. Now, there are obviously limits to that: if you put dark pink on a light red background it's going to be hard to see. And that brings us to our next subject: contrast. You see, there were times when we tweaked different color settings and did in fact see a significant change in content performance. After careful analysis, though, we found that it wasn't the emotive effects of the color palette that we were seeing. It was a change in contrast that suddenly made the content more eye-catching and more visible to a greater number of potential viewers. So next week, we're going to take a look at some guidelines for using contrast to pop your message off the screen and into your viewers' minds. In my opinion, contrast is the most important visual design element for digital signage content. Together with skilled copywriting and an enticing call-to-action, it can make a measurable difference in the success of your advertising and informational messaging.

Then again, maybe color is more valuable than I've suggested. So if you have any stories about how changing the colors in a clip improved its performance, leave a comment and let me know!

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Making great digital signage content: Sorting out font faces, sizes and styles

Author: Bill Gerba on 2008-04-16 08:55:17

If you've worked in an office at any point in the past decade, then you probably know that guy.  His reports, his memos, his typewritten pleas to buy his daughter's Girl Scout cookies... everything he puts on paper uses (gasp) Comic Sans. I don't know who designed that font, but clearly he couldn't have known the full extent of the carnage to come: book reports, birthday cards, banners, websites -- a seemingly endless number of documents have been printed using this over-the-top, hard-to-read typeface.  No, there's nothing funny about Comic Sans, especially if you've tried using it in your digital signage content.  As it turns out, the font you choose can have a significant impact on how much of your message the casual viewer will read and comprehend before moving on. We first talked about text sizes back in 2004, and in today's post we're going to take a closer look at some typography do's and don'ts to help you get the most from your content:

1. DON'T use multiple font faces: Mixing sans-serif and serif fonts together (for example, using Arial and Times in the same sentence) makes it much harder to read. In some tests, using multiple fonts increased the average time-to-read by 100%, though I suspect that at least part of that time was spent trying to figure out exactly what was unusual about the sentence.  I'd suggest limiting yourself to no more than two fonts in any given "scene" in your content.
   
   
2. DON'T use all caps: While you might think that an all-caps sentence would be easier to see and read, the opposite is true. An all-caps line will visually block together and take longer to read and decipher than a normally-capitalized line. It's still OK to use capitalization for emphasis, of course, but I recommend limiting that to a single word or two.
   
   
3. DON'T stack lines: Just like the all-caps note above, stacking lines of text directly on top of each other can make them more graphically pleasing, but often comes at the expense of readability.  If you must use multiple lines of text in your content, keep them visually separate from other items on the screen at the same time. It's also a good idea to use a high-contrast color scheme to make the letters as distinct and easy-to-read as possible.
   
   
4. DON'T abuse colored text: I completely understand that digital signs can show off a wide array of eye-catching colors, gradients and other effects, so I don't want to suggest that everything should be (literally) black and white.  However, we've also found that when you have less contrast between the text and the background, the message takes longer to read and is harder to see from a distance. So, you can go ahead and use your bright red copy on a pale beige gradient background, but think twice before throwing some chartreuse text onto a spring green background.
   
   
5. DON'T skew text: One of the more surprising results from our study was that skewing or slanting text -- even something as simple as going from Arial to Arial Italic -- can have a pretty serious impact on visibility and time-to-read.  The more severe the slant, the more pronounced this effect was.  So if you don't have to use italics, it's best to avoid this effect entirely.
   
   
6. DO use sans-serif fonts whenever possible: Serifs are those little dangly things on letters that make them look fancy. Many studies have looked at whether serifs make particular fonts easier or harder to read, and there's evidence in favor of both sides. My personal feeling is that serifs make small text easier to read, which is why these fonts are common in books and newspapers. But when it comes to digital signs and other large-format media, you'll get the best results if you focus on sans-serif fonts. If you think about it, this makes sense: when the viewer only has a second or two to read text on a screen that's several feet away, the simple shapes of sans-serif fonts take less cognitive effort to recognize and decipher.
   
   
7. DO make your text big enough: Small text is probably the most common problem that I see on digital signs.  Without my glasses on, my vision is about 20/40 -- not terrible, but not great either.  But with them on, it's 20/15, which is better than average. So why do I still find myself squinting and walking towards the screen just to figure out what it says? As a starting point, here is what Clear Channel recommends for text shown on roadside billboards:
   
   

   Viewing Distance (feet)	Minimum Readable Text Height (inches)
   5' - 50'	1" - 2"
   50' - 100'	2" - 4"
   100' - 200'	4" - 8"

   
   The Kentucky Department of Transportation and the OAAA have come up with similar guidelines, and if anything, our own research says to err towards the higher end of these recommendations.  What does this mean for you? Well, on a typical 40" screen at 720p resolution, your text should be at least 70 pixels tall if you want people to read it from a few yards away.

In general, time is your enemy: the longer it takes a viewer to make sense of your message, the less chance they'll read and understand the whole thing. As usual, graphic designers will be faced with the difficult challenge of balancing the brand's need for eye-catching visual pizzazz with the viewer's need for simplicity. While the former can be important for grabbing a viewer's attention and getting them to look at the screen, the latter is critical for getting the important part of the message across. Next week, we'll take an in-depth look at color: a basic yet powerful tool for making your content more visually appealing.

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