Why Workplace Screens Capture Attention

Key Takeaways

• Large screens naturally attract attention because the eye is drawn towards light in a physical environment
• Digital signage can be especially valuable for deskless or manufacturing teams where personal devices are not permitted
• The illusion of depth helps explain why a distant large screen can feel more noticeable than a small device nearby

Topics

• Digital Signage
• Communications
• Cognition

Transcript

I suppose the one thing you have here is that even a modestly sized screen, but most of the screens are pretty big these days, like a kind of 50 or 60-inch screen, up on a wall, emitting all of this light in the environment. It's actually one of the few digital mediums in a physical environment can actually capture your attention, whereas everything else is more of a distraction from your phone or your device. And in some of these environments, you're not allowed, you know, if a deskless work, it's like we've got here in manufacturing, they're not actually allowed to have personal devices out there. But the eye just is drawn towards light. I mean, if you ever look at a small child, a baby or a toddler, if there's like a really bright light, they just instantly kind of go towards it. And so the reality is we're just going to be seeing these screens the moment we walk in, even if we're not necessarily going up very deliberately like they are in this picture and actually reading it, you're going to pick up that information irregardless once you basically walk into that room and scope it out. Yeah, there's the white paper's call out a principle they refer to as the illusion of depth, which basically means that if you have a screen, as you can see my phone here, taking up this amount of real estate, visual real estate, and a large screen far away taking up the same amount of my visual real estate, the large screen, even though it's farther away, will attract my attention. And actually at first I was a bit, when I first read that, I was a little dubious because we're so obsessed with our small screens. But I actually, I experienced this, and it always surprises me a little bit. I experience this on a weekly basis just in our own office. Yeah. We have, obviously we work with screens, and in our Belfast hub, we've got a bank of screens behind me that I don't really see, but we have screens on the side of the office that we use for communication. We use to keep all our teams up to date, and we use them to let them know what's going on. And I regularly find myself drawn to a headline or something on the screen and getting up and maybe scanning the QR code or even talking to someone about it. And quite often after that, I realise I've already seen that earlier on in the day in a Slack feed, but it had not drawn my attention to it.