You walk up to a touch screen in an exhibition. There, glowing in the mood lighting are those four little words: “touch screen to begin”.
Now you are probably assuming that
- this is a screen saver,
- visitors need to be lead by the nose,
- this is just how things have always been done,
- there are no other options…
But you are wrong!
Screen burn in
Screen savers came into vogue because of the tendency of the old CRT and plasma monitors to retain images that didn’t change much. Usually the screen saver would be a rotating set of images or a logo bouncing around the screen.
These can also be known as an attract loop. Usually you have a set of images or animations that are cycled though to get a visitor’s attention while the call to action “touch screen to begin” pulses.
Just to let people know that this monitor is used for an interactive display, the words “touch screen to begin” would fade in and out to wake the computer up and start the interactive.
After a period of inactivity by the user, the computer would go back to the screen saver.
These days LCD monitors are much more robust as far as burn in is concerned, so we can afford to look at other solutions. It’s not to say that LCDs can’t burn in: it’s just that they don’t do it as easily.
Encouraging visitors
Given that most museums have a “look but don’t touch” feel about them, you could be forgiven thinking that you need to explicitly tell people when they can touch a screen. This may well have been true 10 years ago, but not these days.
The new expectation is that monitors are there to be touched: you do it with your phone, at the real estate displays, at information kiosks, and many other locations. People will at least drag their fingers over a screen to see what it will do.
Just browsing
Some people just don’t want to interact with your multimedia no matter what instructions you give them! They just want to watch someone else use it, or (if there is no one else around) would like the information to be packaged much like you would do if you were planning a documentary.
This is not hard to include if you know ahead of time that this is required.
Status quo
Just because everyone else does it this way doesn’t mean that you have to.
Your options are:
- have the interactive randomly show content from the multimedia
- show highlights from the content in a specific order
- create an attract loop
- have a small printed label informing visitors that this is an interactive
What you choose depends on your particular circumstances.
Solutions
If you have a collection of loosely related items in the interactive, the random display of content may be appropriate. Our work with Port Arthur and the Urban Redevelopment Authority used this approach.
If the content can be curated into a narrative, it may be more useful to display content linearly so that a story may be told. In choosing this, it is important to let a viewer (who is passively enjoying the display) know how far though the presentation they are. Another option here is to let people choose to view the story when they are using the interactive. Land and People and Orbital were perfect for this.
These two options make heavy use of the material within the interactive – no point letting all that hard work go to waste! They also show the interface in action, demonstrating for the visitor how the interactive works while teasing them with the content that they can see if they choose to dive in!
An attract loop is still a good option when a punchy message about the multimedia can convey useful information to people just walking past. This will usually limit you to 10 seconds to no more than 30 seconds. Games use this well.
A small printed label (possibly containing an icon) encouraging interaction is a good final step: they don’t take up much space, they are easy to read, and the screen can always be displaying content.
Usually we find that a combination of these options will be the perfect solution to any interactive multimedia solution.
The main thing we are after is a changing display that will minimise the burn in and maximise the life of your LCD displays.
What is required?
Surprisingly: not much!
We need to know how you would like to handle this part of the interactive. What do you hope to achieve with the unattended screen?
We usually assemble systems with some sort of database driven content. This could be something internal to the presentation (that you never see), an XML file that everyone can edit, or an actual database with multimedia content in it.
Designing things this way makes for a more flexible approach to changing content requirements as a project progresses and has the added bonus that we can easily show visitors specific parts of it in the screen savers.
On the other hand, an attract loop needs video animation or Flash animation to be completed for the project.
So, with the right approach to content and interface design there should be very little reason to have that “touch screen to begin” directive ever again!