Key Takeaways

• Dwell time varies dramatically by location: corridors allow seconds, break rooms allow minutes
• Short dwell times require concise text and images; longer periods enable storytelling
• Same screen may have different dwell times throughout the day requiring schedule adjustments

Topics

• Content Strategy
• User Experience
• Data & Analytics

Transcript

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.