Role
Lead UX Designer
Year
2023
Digital Signage
Clean and flexible digital signage that can be managed remotely and applied across the enterprise.
Overview
Sharp HealthCare added an extension to its corporate office building called the Sharp Prebys Innovation and Education Center. The new facility will be home to the Caster Nursing Institute, Simulation Lab, and the Foundation and executive teams. Executive leaders looked for a way to display updates and recognitions in the lobby. Since the building would receive many visitors, the team also looked for a way to display events and meetings.
Goals
Create a simple, clean, and easy system for displaying organization updates and recognitions.
Provide a way to find current meetings at a glance.
Team
Product manager
Content designer
Visual Designer
Users
Visitors who are unfamiliar with the building and want to learn more about Sharp
Employees visiting for training and conferences in a variety of rooms
Lobby staff who help direct visitors to public areas of the building
Scope
Create display-only screens that could be used to provide a variety of updates and information—announcements, events, news, recognitions, and timelines
Create display-only screens that could display events for up to 8 rooms within a 90-minute window
Design the screens and content models so that they could be used across the enterprise
All screens are created using Contentful
Results
Screens are live in the new building.
Content authors are creating and planning new content as requests come in.
We have a flexible Digital Signage tool that can be used in other buildings across the enterprise.
Process
Wireframes—Simple and flexible design
The Sharp Prebys Innovation and Education Center (SPIEC) lobby specs identified 2 landscape monitors and 1 portrait monitor that would be used to display a variety of content along a Wall of Excellence. These screens could be used to display a variety of content, including but not limited to announcements, events, news, recognition, and timelines.
As I started wireframing, I conducted research on other digital signage examples and their use cases. Most digital signage screens I found were used in hotel or conference settings where they display a combination of widgets and the latest events. However, we were limited to simple content types that we could create in Contentful.
In our use case, I wanted to keep the design simple as well to make them as flexible as possible for content authors. I drew inspiration from minimalist digital signage screens that focused on imagery and large text to tell a story.
Another screen in the lobby close to the reception desk would be used to display a schedule of events in public rooms of the building. One of the biggest challenges for this design was fitting 8 rows of rooms with a variety of meeting lengths into a narrow space. I took inspiration from Spotify's mobile app to animate and wrap long text in narrow spaces. I also tried to keep the information for each meeting as minimal as possible while still providing enough context for wayfinding.
Throughout each wireframe iteration, I regularly presented to the User Experience team, the Digital Experience team, and the client for feedback.
Clean and accessible visual design
Once the wireframes were approved, I worked closely with our UI Designer to make the designs as clean and accessible as possible.
We aimed for the text to be large enough to read from around 10 feet away. We also wanted to ensure there was enough contrast for better accessibility.
Our UI Designer trued up the designs to match our DSM style as well as the styles in the lobby for a seamless experience.
Creating models aligned with design
Our development team took a first pass at creating the content types for Scheduling screens and Digital Signage content screens. I reviewed each content type to provide help text and make to make the editing experience as easy as possible. During development and UAT, I worked closely with the developers to make adjustments to the models as needed.
Remote and online validation
Once the lobby and the monitors were available for us to test, we visited in person to validate that the screens were rendering as expected and that the text sizes were large enough on the screens from various distances.
We made small adjustments and enhancements to improve the design padding and readability.
