When content is hard to update, people don’t

There’s a little known secret in digital signage: It’s actually really easy to get some content up on a screen. Buy an old desktop or laptop computer, create a Powerpoint presentation, and set it to loop infinitely. Plug it into a screen, and job done. Easy.

There’s a problem with this approach, however: As long as the screen is plugged into the computer, it’s hard to do updates to the presentation. And - fact of life - people are lazy. If something is perceived as being low importance but high amount of ‘pain’, it simply doesn’t get done. Frequently, ‘updating the presentation’ falls in precisely this category.

An example from the American Embassy

In February 2015, I was in the American Embassy in London, and was vacantly staring at the screens. They have a looping Powerpoint presentation that is really useful: It shows what order to put your documents in in order to get a visa. Great.

As a photographer, one particular set of slides piqued my interest: The United States Embassy was doing a photography competition, where you could submit your holiday photos from the US, and win a prize. They wanted photos from national parks, from famous landmarks, and from Real American Things. And they wanted them emailed to them… Before the December 2013 deadline.

To me, this was one of the big epiphanies I had about why ScreenCloud makes so much sense. The fact that the embassy had a slide show that was at least 18 months out of date is embarrassing; and it would have been so easily avoided. If you don’t have a new photo competition, at leat remove the old slides from the slide show.

On the other hand, I also know how big organisations like that operate. Someone will at some point have been in charge of creating that slideshow, but nobody ever bothered updating it.

What if it were easy?

Of course, things would be extremely different if it were easy to update the content. If, sitting at your desk, you could delete a slide out of the presentation. Or, when an important holiday rolls around, that you add a few holiday-themed slides. Maybe a video of an eagle soaring through the sky. Perhaps some footage from a recent sports event where your team did well. Or maybe… the list is endless

At ScreenCloud, we believe that by making it ludicrously easy to do something, people will do it more. Of course, there’s science to back that up, but it’s common sense as well: Improve the cost/benefit equation, and people find it easier to motivate themselves to make sure a job gets done.

If you love your staff, and if you care about what your customers see (or, come to think of it, perhaps especially if you hate your staff, and you don’t give a damn about you customers), the very least you can help them with is to make the work as frictionless as possible.

And that is where ScreenCloud Signage comes in. Make it easy. Make it fun. Make it happen.