Explore how to optimise screen content design by considering viewing environments and simplifying data visualisation. Learn the importance of tailoring dashboards for broader audiences, not just data scientists.

Improving Screen Content Design for Better Communication

I don't think we talk enough about screen content design. Often when I look at a customer's account, they'll be uploading the content they would have otherwise be emailing around or printing out. Now the problem is, people are gonna be upwards of 10 feet or more away, the screen may be high in the sky, or we may even be walking past the screen at speed. You simply cannot read that amount of content and fully understand it. We need to consider the environment that people are in and the amount of time they will have to process the information. It's not that hard just to be a little bit more deliberate in our choices. This also extends out to data visualization. One of our most popular features at ScreenCloud is securely displaying dashboards on a screen. However, most of those dashboards have been designed by data scientists for other data scientists. We need to do a cut version of that where maybe only one or two key numbers are nice and big, flagged to all, and understood by everyone who's looking at the screen.

Discover how real-time data visualisation can enhance productivity on manufacturing floors by 10 to 15 percent. Learn the importance of simplified dashboards and trusted data sources for effective performance measurement.

Boosting Productivity with Real-Time Data Visualisation

So I was talking to a customer recently who said that once they had visualized data to the teams on their manufacturing floors, they saw an uplift in productivity between 10 and 15 percent. That is insane levels of return on investment for the money spent on screens and keeping those screens up to date. And it makes sense. If people know their data, they can measure their performance against it. If they're not informed of what is going well and what isn't going well, how are they ever going to adjust it? I think we need to see much more data in our environments, ideally real time, and certainly has to be trusted, pulling from a source of truth and never getting out of date. Often people are putting up dashboards that they would also give their business analysts. This is a mistake too. We need to keep dashboards simple and focused on the metrics that matter, maybe incorporating a traffic light color coding system to make it even easier to understand. There are so many things we can do. And at ScreenCloud, we integrate with Microsoft Power BI and all of the other major dashboard providers. So if you'd like to hear more about data visualization, then get in touch.

Explore how repetition in digital content can enhance user engagement without overwhelming the audience. Understand the cognitive benefits of familiarising with data and how it aids in quick detection of anomalies.

The Power of Repetition in Digital Communication

if you were to send the same person the same email, it would come across well either like weird or maybe even slightly aggressive or hey why are you kind of you know spamming my inbox with this you know those SDRs who are always like hey pop up the inbox it's annoying right but what they're doing is they're trying to repeat and grab your attention but actually repeating a message on a screen in the environment in which you're in you know it's not asking you to go up and look at it all the time so the fact that it's repeating makes more sense you're you're okay with it repeating because you're like well you know it's for maybe someone else who hasn't seen it the first time whatever now of course you can fatigue content but actually that that repetition especially if it's the corner of your eye that's picking it up have you ever noticed i'm not very good at numbers like i have a bit of a number dyslexia but i'm not terrible but what i have noticed is when i get because i because i'm struggling a bit with numbers when i get familiar with them i very quickly notice when they change so if i have a dashboard like this and i know that those numbers are normally in this case what 69 57 if that's suddenly changed my eye would sort of go oh that number's a lot different than normal but if you show me a load of numbers and say do something i'm like no no i i panic about that but if i get comfortable with it and that's where that cognition and repetition comes from then actually i'm quite observant and i think a lot of people other people are like that as well um but yeah this is this is the medium in which repetition is expected and is not um it's not like annoying for the audience but it also means you can start to encode those memories

This video explores the potential of global tech talent, particularly in Eastern Europe and South America. It highlights the benefits of embracing diverse skills and the educational systems that foster technical expertise.

Embracing Global Tech Talent in Outsourcing

I haven't really, like, obviously, I can't talk about every region in the world because I don't have experience. Like, obviously, there's a vast amount of tech talent in India, for example, and we actually have very, quite a large number of Indian nationals working in our Bangkok team, but I've never had a team in India. So I don't know. I mean, I know it's pretty big and stuff like that. I've obviously had experience in Ukraine through personal relationships. I've also experienced teams in Bulgaria. I think there's a very interesting kind of Eastern European skill, like, range there. And I think a lot of that comes from a much more sort of rigorous academic upbringing, especially in maths and science, which we don't have so much in the UK and America, I think. So I think that there's just people are naturally kind of, like, more technically minded because of the way that they're educated. I think the education system in the East, from what I can tell, and I think I can talk to that relatively, you know, as an outsider, I'm very impressed, like, and I wish we had more of that here. I wish we had more emphasis on science and key skills like maths, which we let go way too easily. I think there's just obvious talent there. And then, you know, I think you've also got to be honest. It's like, it's coming from countries where, like, you know, this is a very good route towards making more money, right? That is useful and powerful. And I think IT outsourcing is quite possible. There's other skills that wouldn't be so easy to outsource, such as sales, right, for example. So yeah, I guess Eastern Europe lends itself to that. I'm hearing a lot of US companies having great success in South America, Latin America, but like, I mean, I can only really talk from my own experiences, but I think the world is full of much more talent than maybe a lot of the West realizes. And I think being able to kind of embrace that, I think it's good for everyone if we really embrace the talent tha

Discover the importance of understanding dwell times and peak traffic periods for effective digital signage. Learn how local insights and basic tracking can enhance your strategy and engage your audience during peak moments.

Optimising Digital Signage Strategy Effectively

Okay, another spicy take here. We have no idea about dwell times or peak traffic periods in front of our screens. Most screens are managed centrally by a small team who could have no idea really about every location those screens are in. Because even in the location itself, if that screen is by the entrance versus a break room versus being on the production line, for example, they're gonna have very different dwell times, which is the amount of time a person is in front of that screen. And peak traffic, which is just the number of people going by the screen every day, every week, even might be seasonal. If you multiply that by all of the locations and in the fact that those people aren't even based there, how are they ever going to truly understand this? That is justification for not doing it at all. But the reality is it's these peak moments during a day or during a week that you're going to capture the imagination and the attention of people that are so important to getting your digital signage strategy right. So we need to try and investigate more, talk to local managers, for example, they'll probably instinctively know, maybe even doing some basic tracking just on a number of screens, just to understand what's really going on. And then publishing our content and pushing the most important messages during those periods and anticipating the mood and the need of the audience in front of them. So dwell times, traffic times are really important. Mostly, none of us really have any idea what's going on, but we can do better at this.

The CEO's role evolves significantly from 5 million to 20 million ARR. You shift from hands-on leadership to guiding a fully developed leadership team. You'll likely move upstream to bigger customers and contracts, requiring expanded support teams. And you'll need robust data and reporting systems to replace the organic understanding you had when directly involved in everything.

Evolving CEO Role from 5M to 20M ARR in B2B SaaS

So, on the journey from 5 million to 20 million ARR, I think the role of the CEO evolves in multiple ways, but the three that come to mind would be, firstly, how hands-on you are. At 5 million, you're still going to be very much in the trenches. You'll be building out the start of your leadership team, but you're probably still very much being the main leader and coach. At 20 million, you really need to have your leadership team fleshed out, and you're working mostly with them rather than with the people who are working inside of those teams. Secondly, if it's B2B SaaS, mostly I imagine you'll be going into bigger customers and bigger contracts. If you're doing small contract values at 5 million, you need to do a lot more of them to be keeping your growth rate going at 20 million. So, it's much easier if you can attract bigger customers and be selling more to those customers than just doing a massive number of customers. Not everyone follows that path, but generally speaking, most of us will probably go upstream, and that has a load of other elements to it, not just the product improving for enterprise and being more applicable to enterprise, but you also have to build out success teams, finance teams, even have more legal support, et cetera, to do that. And the third one would be numbers. At 5 million, you don't really need that extensive reporting. You need to be on top of your numbers so that you know what's going on. But you probably don't have a RevOps team necessarily really going at that point. By 20 million, you need to have data and reporting extensively to give you what previously you would have understood everything a bit more organically because you were involved in most of those things. When you're less involved at the day-to-day level, the data and reporting helps you to identify what isn't and isn't working well. And if you haven't got a good handle on that, a data lake and a good reporting system, you're going to struggle.

Beyond immediate ROI from print savings, the elephant in the room is measuring productivity impact. A US communications company tested ScreenCloud on alternate floors for three months, then surveyed recall rates. Results were remarkable: recall jumped from 25-30% to 70-80%—but only for snackable content like events and deadlines, not complex storytelling like merger details.

Driving Productivity with Digital Signage Innovations

So I've talked extensively about immediate ROI of using modern digital signage. We've talked about reducing print costs and the time it takes to change those signs on the notice board. We've talked about reducing the burden on IT and automating more content up on the screens for the comms team. But the elephant in the room is clearly the impact of digital signage on driving change and productivity inside of a business. Now, unfortunately, as an industry, we don't really have standard ways of measuring this. Most people are doing it through pulse surveys, employee surveys, and looking for sentiment changes or any anecdotal evidence. We're trying to change that. And actually, I am hearing that there may even be a Google Analytics for Screens coming from the team at Google themselves. But obviously, we work very closely with our customers. We've heard multiple anecdotes of how screens are really driving change. So a very large US communications company was using ScreenCloud in their HQ and decided to initially install it on alternate floors. So some floors had ScreenCloud, some floors just had the notice boards as usual. And after three months, they did a survey based on the types of content that they had shown to see what the improvement on recall rates had been. The results were amazing. So recall rates were averaging, or most of this information, around 25% to 30% by default. When content was then shown on screen, it went up to 70% and 80%. But only for certain types of content. Some content had no impact at all. It was generally content that was more snackable and easy to remember. So it may be a big event or deadline coming up, or an announcement, or a bit of people updates and things like that. When it came to more nuanced storytelling about a recent merger, for example, it hadn't really improved things because probably that content was too complicated for people to pick up in that snackable way. We also worked with another customer recently who was using screens

I discuss the challenge of displaying business intelligence dashboards on digital signage. Whilst ScreenCloud enables secure dashboard display, BI tools are designed for analysts, not general audiences; simplified, screen-appropriate designs using traffic light systems work far better.

Optimising Business Dashboards for Digital Signage

So one of the biggest feature requests we ever had at ScreenCloud since we started was the ability to show business intelligence dashboards securely up on screen. It was one of the hardest features for us to build, and we did a really good job of it. And now you can show pretty much any dashboard you want up on a screen securely. Great. Not quite. Most business intelligence dashboards are designed by business analysts. For people to be able to pore over and produce reports from and intelligence. Now, if you put that dashboard up on a screen 20 foot in the sky in front of someone who maybe hasn't even seen these kind of dashboards before and expect them to change their behavior, you're kind of howling at the moon, right? Business intelligence people build dashboards for other business intelligence people. Doesn't mean the data in them isn't relevant. It's super relevant, but probably the format of it is not suitable for digital signage. So much as we allow customers and encourage them to put data up there and it is one of our greatest features, we also emphasize the design of those dashboards needs to be appropriate for screen. Maybe just using a simple traffic system of red, green, amber to highlight when things are good and bad and just to have fewer numbers on there so it's easier for people in front of that screen to understand and maybe to actually make some kind of change as a result. Microsoft Mechanics www.microsoft.com 

I explore dwell time as the crucial factor in content planning for digital signage. A corridor viewer has three seconds whilst a break room visitor has minutes, requiring completely different content strategies for the same audience in different locations.

Maximise Engagement with Dwell Time in Digital Signage

So dwell time is probably the most important thing to consider when you're planning out your digital signage content. And what do we mean by dwell time? Well, it literally is just the amount of time a person is going to be in front of the screen to see that content. So think of a high-traffic area like a corridor. Someone's going to be walking past that screen. The dwell time could be literally three seconds, unless they stop and look, which is kind of rare. Now, in a break room, for example, the dwell time could be a matter of minutes. So this is very, very different, even though it's the same audience. If you're going straight past in a short dwell time, you can really only afford to put text and maybe an image up on the screen just to get your message understood. If you had a two-minute video, you have no idea what point in the video they're going to be walking by, and therefore, the context is completely lost. However, you completely flip that round if they are going to be there for several minutes. And actually, that gives you the opportunity to tell more of a story, to embellish your point, to be a little bit more entertaining, rather than just showing text and images, which is going to be a bit boring. So think about the likely dwell time, and even one screen may have different types of dwell time at different times of day. So as people are flooding into a building, they might actually be going straight past, not even stopping in the break room, just going straight in and out the door. But then during that lunchtime break, they might actually genuinely be there for longer. So you can start to observe traffic flows. There's sophisticated ways of doing this. You can actually track it using technology. But a simple way to begin is just to go to that environment and look for yourself or talk to the people that work there. They'll tell you when people are hanging around and when they're not.