Signbox sales team talk about the benefits of digital signage and wayfinding in the office environment.
How to use digital signage successfully in an office environment
The beauty of digital signage and wayfinding lies in the multiple functions and benefits that can be achieved from just one single screen. From a welcome message, wayfinding signage, advertisement and broadcasting messages to news and weather, this can all be changed and updated with a click of a button.
With clever and well thought out digital signage design, you can take your visitor on an intuitive journey throughout a building, from the moment they arrive to the point when they leave. This can be integrated seamlessly into the building design so that it compliments its surroundings, sits cohesively alongside the static signage and has maximum impact. For this to be successful, it’s important to consider your demographic and brand carefully to ensure the content is relevant, helpful and reinforces your corporate identity in a positive way.
Considering inbound and outbound traffic
When visitors or employees enter a building, it’s important to evaluate the information they will need. Think about directions to the restroom, information on the desks that are free, where a meeting room is located or directions to the café or restaurant. Being able to access an easy-to-use self-service kiosk with touch screens and maps so you can zoom in and find the location you’re heading to can be extremely helpful. With a QR code, instructions can also be downloaded straight to your phone so you can even take your directions with you.
When people are leaving a building, it’s important to consider the information they’ll need. Where’s the local taxi rank? Is my flight on time? Where is the closest tube station? What’s the weather forecast? To have this live information on a screen as you leave is clearly beneficial and dramatically reinforces the positive experience a visitor will enjoy as they travel across and from the building.
The benefits of digital signage
A truly successful fully integrated digital signage and wayfinding system will connect a building and allow you to navigate seamlessly throughout it. The use of sound and moving images will be engaging and user-friendly ensuring visitors feel looked after; their experiences relaxing and without stress.
Digital screens can be easily updated and changed daily if required with zero waste or additional cost. This will not only benefit visitors, but also employees as the solution creates a more connected, seamless building environment that brings every department and floor together.
Over the last two years, there has been a substantial shift in the way we work as employees favour a more hybrid approach and an increased reliance on hot desking. With that change a greater requirement for interactive digital kiosks has emerged that allows staff to see live information on available desks and even which desks have been cleaned. Even more invaluable is an integrated room booking system that can allow employees to see which rooms are booked and for how long – all this can be linked to your in-house system for everyone to access.
Building owners benefit too; they can evaluate analytical data to understand how their building is functioning and the improvements they could make. For example, they can see those areas of the building and desks that are most popular and even the screens and content that receive the most engagement to allow them to implement effective changes.
Emergency broadcast messaging can be distributed quickly and simultaneously to everyone in the building and changed and updated as required. For example, messages can be sent to multiple platforms, such as whiteboards, laptops and tablets to help everyone exit safely from a building. Information can even extend to giving people live instructions on which staircases to take and where their closest exit is to reduce panic and ease confusion.
As well as digital signage and wayfinding you can also create digital environmental graphics within your office by using multiple LCD screens to create dynamic video walls. It’s possible to create a dynamic, immersive space to completely transform your office in ways that simply couldn’t be achieved with static images alone. Options are vast and include imagery such as waterfalls, beautiful fields filled with flowers and fabulous ocean depths – the possibilities are truly endless.
Connecting people with nature and using biophilic design is also proven to enhance mood and morale, improve wellbeing and energise staff – by using video, sound and motion sensors, the results can be incredibly effective.
Why it’s critical to consider digital signage and wayfinding in the early stages of a building design
The concept of digital signage and wayfinding is growing rapidly across the globe as the cost of screens become more competitive and companies begin to appreciate the huge benefits of moving to digital.
Both digital signage and wayfinding are about environments, productivity and being connected within the workplace. However, such solutions can often be an afterthought, yet if it was taken into account early on in the building design stage, substantial cost savings, improved efficiency and a guaranteed, building-wide seamless design could undoubtedly be achieved.
Never forget the power of traditional hard signage
At Signbox, our core business remains hard static signage – that simply can’t be replaced with screens. There will always be a desire for different textures, materials, and colours to create stunning environments that reflect the brand and the organisation’s ethos. We use floor to ceiling textured wallcoverings, glass manifestations, illuminated signage and beautiful metal architectural signage to enhance a company’s brand and really bring a building to life.
Essentially, people need things they can touch and feel – which can’t be replicated digitally. It’s important to understand that digital and hard signage can sit alongside each other in a cohesive way and complement one another; having continuity between the two is imperative.
Imagine navigating through a hospital campus where there are so many pieces of information to disseminate: floors and ward numbers, zones, places where public can and can’t walk, etc. It wouldn’t be cost effective to replace this amount of wayfinding with digital signage as there are simply too many pieces of information within too many locations on a journey. You can, however, improve the efficiency of the dissemination of information – and that’s where digital signage can make the winning difference.
Looking to the future with AI
By incorporating AI (artificial intelligence) technology into a fully integrated digital signage and wayfinding system, you can completely personalise the overall experience. For example, with number plate recognition in car parks and face recognition in building reception areas, it’s possible to create personalised welcome messaging, wayfinding and advertising. AI can go even further with sensors that are linked to room temperature and air quality to create an impactful, tailored experience that has clear benefits for visitors and other building users.
What are we doing at Signbox?
At Signbox, we’re working closely with our partners and clients to support the design, content and installation of fully integrated digital signage and wayfinding schemes. Every solution we create helps tell the story of the building and improve the overall experience for its visitors and employees.
All the time we’re reinforcing our clients’ brands using colour, images, sound, iconography and typography to ensure the design complements their traditional hard signage – at the same time improving the functionality of their buildings. Careful consideration is taken to understand the demographic of visitors and employees and how they will navigate the building. This is the only way to ensure that the digital signage and wayfinding scheme we create will enhance every journey, offer the best possible services and connect buildings in ways that was never possible before.
If you need help designing your digital signage scheme, please get in touch with Signbox at sales@signbox.co.uk or sign up for our RIBA accredited CPD on ‘Digital Signage and Wayfinding as part of the building design’.
