Make a Digital Signage Checklist Before Launch!

The scope of digital signage can vary from a single touchscreen display to synchronized video wall elements throughout an entire location. Testing is a vital step in the process of setting up digital signage successfully, although that’s easier said than done. It’s important to establish the necessary steps via a solid digital signage checklist for a smooth launch of your first campaign, but also those that come after it. Let’s examine the most important steps, from pressing the power button on the display to viewing the playback reports!

Verify hardware functionality

The most obvious steps include checking the basic hardware functionality. If you’ve been experimenting already, you’ll have most of these covered. Still, in case you’re deploying a series of brand new displays, take basic precautions. A model of a batch may be faulty! Check if screens power on and check if your images and videos are displaying well.

Some settings for brightness, contrast, or saturation could be pre-set differently. A pro tip is to keep the displays running for some time to examine their behavior in the long run. You might encounter auto-shut downs for power-saving or similar presets you forgot to disable and adjust yourself.

In case you run external media players with your display, confirm their functionality as well. Ensure access to the internet. Depending on the combination of your software, hardware, and internet access, you might need to tweak some settings to ensure full connectivity. Thankfully, there are answers for pretty much every combination online, so long as you know what to search for. As for software, reaching out to your provider for some help is always an option.

Check touchscreen functionality and kiosk mode to prevent exiting the application. If you rely on sensor input, measure their accuracy. For example, if you run motion sensors to track traffic, test if they track and record data correctly.

Confirm content visibility

One of the simplest tests is to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and verify your content is legible and visible. A common, yet an almost unavoidable error is the inconsistency between appearance of content on your computer versus a display in your storefront. Apart from different levels of illumination and surroundings, it is not uncommon for displays to display hues of color in a slightly different way. You may discover that previously visible content during the designing stage has become impossible to decipher for your audience. Most of the time, this isn’t an issue and with time you learn what works and what doesn’t.

Test software and CMS performance

After ensuring your devices are paired with your digital signage software, double check its functionality. With OnSign, for example, begin by ensuring all of your players are successfully connected to the platform and that the appropriate staff members are assigned roles and can perform key actions.

Ensure content is up to date, including prices or product descriptions. It can be tough to keep track of everything individually. This is why it’s vital to build a consistent database already from the beginning of your digital signage journey. In case you haven’t, start now! 

Avoid campaigns or compositions only being used once. Instead, build templates which can be updated with just a few clicks. For any kind of data which changes over time, such as prices or dates, don’t insert this information directly into an image. As you manually re-arrange or update the price of a product directly in the layout, you’ll have to do it this way every time for each image and waste time. Instead, insert such information through a composition which is connected to a Data Feed. Then simply update the information at the source, resulting in quick updates across hundreds of templates and campaigns.

Ensure compatibility and scalability

The initial run of your content may go smoothly, but be mindful of future runs. As you shuffle content across different displays and change the sizes of layout elements, run tests and be mindful of how well content behaves in different contexts. A three-part layout may look flawless on one display, but could look strange on a different display with a different resolution. It is often overlooked to make sure that images or videos need to fit the screen region they will occupy, otherwise the media player has to resize them as he plays them. 

Apps are a great little trick when using different screens sizes, as their visual elements are responsive to the size you shape them to.

Run a Health Check

An awesome feature to add to your digital signage checklist and regularly visit in your OnSign account is the Health Check. If the platform detects any irregularities, issues, or warnings, they will show up here. For example, if a piece of content was deleted, making a campaign deploy a black screen, this will show up here. You’ll also be alerted of upcoming issues, such as low storage.

A good rule of thumb after creating a brand new campaign is to visit the Health Check tab and see if anything comes up.

Prepare for exceptions!

Whether a glitch or error arises with the content, software or hardware, be ready to take action once it does. Remote view is a common feature in most content management platforms, OnSign included, allowing you to quickly check on the situation as if you were in front of the display as long as the device remains online. For hardware issues, prepare your staff on location to be ready to deal with them as soon as possible, whether it be a quick reset of the device or readjusting settings.

For expired content, set up something for your Fallback Loop. This loop will activate once it detects no regular content is scheduled to play. So, whether through an oversight or an actual content error, the viewer will have something to see.

Playback events and reports help to spot issues you may have missed. Events list what was played on a designated player, giving you a play-by-play insight of what transpired. In case issues emerge, no matter how small, they’ll show up.

Note down your checklist, and go through it!

Depending on the frequency of major content updates, establish the ideal checklist for your case. On the first launch, run through all of the above steps thoroughly. Meanwhile, as you get used to the course of content from upload to publishing, a quick glance at the Health Check and remote viewing the display may just be enough to confirm everything is running smoothly.

All features mentioned in this post are readily accessible to all OnSign users and available to you for testing right away. Give it a go!