Smart Phones, Dwell Time, and Digital Signage. Oh My!

The integration of mobile devices into our everyday life has had a dramatic effect on society, and on dwell time.  Dwell time is how long viewers will look at your content before they lose interest andturn away. For Digital Signage it is the viewer’s attention span generated by your content.  But how have smart phones changed the dwell time landscape?

There is a 50/50 chance that right now you are reading this post on a mobile device. And you probably would not be shocked if I told you I wrote this post and published it using my phone. (I didn’t. But if I needed to, I know I could.)

You can check emails, chat with your friends, order a pizza, play a game, buy an ALF lunchbox from eBay, look for a new job after being fired for spending too much time on your phone….and do this all from your smart phone.

Glance Oriented

As a result, we have become a “glance’ oriented society. You know the scene. You are walking in a store or on the sidewalk and people have their face buried in their phone. They walk about ten steps and glance up for half a step before putting their face right back down again. How many times have you done this or witnessed others doing it?

Our conditioned response has become to glance around, try to see if there is anything interesting or pertinent. If not, move on to the next. And we are now incredibly impatient. Why wait for information to come our way when we have it at our finger tips via the internet on our devices?

Dwell Time

So much thought and planning has to go into your digital signage content, to get the viewer’s attention and engage their brain with your message quickly. How fast?

“A viewer needs time to read and interpret the message on the sign. You get from 1.5 to 3 seconds to grab the viewer’s attention and hold it,” according to the article How Much Time Do Digital Signage Displays Really Have With Viewers? found over at Sixteen:Nine.

Motion For Attention?

Wow! That is not long at all. To compensate, it may seem natural to want to add motion and pulsating graphics to your content that says,”Hey! Look at me! I’m important!” If it were only that easy.

The post continues, “Motion can potentially interfere with the process, as well, because it takes 2 to 10 times longer for the brain to comprehend something that is moving. The critical parts of the message should be static.

A big problem in any digital signage layout is distraction. The more elements on the screen, the less chance the “money” message – the one that really needs to be noticed and remembered – will get missed.”

Capturing that ever elusive dwell time comes down to keeping your message simple and uncluttered. Or you may need to find a way to put it on a smart phone!

© 2017 Noventri All Rights Reserved