EPISODE 171 | Guest: Melissa Sartin, senior creative content artist for Visix
Displaying data on digital displays is a powerful way to keep your audience informed, from showing KPIs and production metrics to progress on company-wide initiatives. But how should you design these messages? What are some of the considerations to keep in mind when trying to make complex information understandable and engaging for your audience?
It’s more complex than a simple text message, but when done right, data-driven content is inherently eye-catching and incredibly useful. This episode breaks down the key design considerations to ensure your data is not just seen but understood in a matter of seconds.
- Learn to avoid the most common design mistakes, like information overload.
- Discover how to intentionally use color, contrast and motion for maximum impact.
- Understand the differences between data visualizations and data mapping.
- Get tips on using color and visual hierarchy to “tell a story” with your data.
- Explore the first steps for success, from planning your goals to testing designs on screen.
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Get more digital signage design advice in our Masterclass Guide 4: Digital Signage Design
Transcript
Derek DeWitt: Digital signage has become much more than just putting out messages and hoping people look at them. One of the things that you can do today is data visualizations, but how does one do that? Especially, how does one go about designing data for digital signage? That is an excellent question.
I don’t know, but my guest today does. She is Melissa Sartin. She is a senior creative content artist for Visix, and she’s gonna talk with me about some of the ins and outs of designing data visualizations for digital signage.
Hi, Melissa. Thanks for coming on.
Melissa Sartin: Hi, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Derek DeWitt: Excellent. And of course, thank you everybody out there for listening. Don’t forget, you can subscribe and share and review and all that, and you can follow along with a transcript on the Visix website. Just go to visix.com/resources.
Okay, Melissa. So, when we’re talking about data visualizations, we’re talking about a kind of a range of possible things that you can stick up there on the screens. I think this is becoming much more important as more and more organizations are starting to do this. They’re starting to realize, hey, this is actually pretty easy to do some data integration and stick this stuff up there and it’s really useful.
Melissa Sartin: Yeah, exactly. It can really streamline the process and take a lot of the headache out of getting information to your displays.
Derek DeWitt: Obviously designing data visualizations, it’s not the exact same thing as just a simple message, hey, 401(k) signup, hey, there’s a food truck coming in, hey, don’t forget the fun run. Those are our normal kinds of messages, but this does have a few more steps involved. It can be somewhat challenging, especially if you didn’t even know that your software could do it.
Melissa Sartin: Right, right. So, there’s definitely a lot more information to contend with and you gotta be familiar, number one, with what it is, how you wanna use it, how to get it on your screen, and how it’s gonna look while it’s there.
Derek DeWitt: But why would someone want to do this? Why are more people starting to do it? What are some of the benefits?
Melissa Sartin: Well, I mean, number one, you can convey more information, and it might be more interesting and more useful information, depending on the context and how you use it. It could really help your organization to stay organized, to be sure that people are aware of what’s going on as far as KPI data or shift boards, or there’s any number of use cases for how this can really help organizations.
Derek DeWitt: Now, of course, when you’re designing this stuff, you have to keep in mind all the usual design advice out there. You have to think about how big your fonts are, not too many fonts, viewing distances, viewing angles, all the normal stuff that goes into the normal messages obviously applies here as well.
Melissa Sartin: Sure, absolutely. If it’s not eye-catching, it’s less likely that people are really gonna absorb what you’re trying to put out there.
Derek DeWitt: I think that one of the things about data visualizations though is that they are sort of, I think, inherently eye-catching, especially if you’re using some kind of a graph or graphical representation of the data. It’s not just a spreadsheet duplicated up on the digital signs. I think you kind of go, oh, what’s that? In business context, I think we’re all kind of attracted to those kind of visuals.
Melissa Sartin: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And like you said, especially if they are heavily visual charts, graphs, infographics, iconography that supports it, that’s gonna catch your eye more so than an Excel spreadsheet up on the screen, like you just said.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, that’s for sure. I immediately start tuning out the moment I see a spreadsheet format.
Melissa Sartin: I think everyone does, to be honest.
Derek DeWitt: I go, that’s for the accounting department; that’s not me.
Now, real quick, just so people understand, we’re talking about data visualizations, not data mapping, which are different animals, right?
Melissa Sartin: Yeah. So, data visualization is how does it look and how do you process the information in a way that’s clear and concise and eye-catching, whereas data mapping is more of the process of how does the data get from point A to point B. So, I guess it would be more of the technical software-ey kind of side of it.
Derek DeWitt: Sure, sure, sure. I think we’ve all seen what we’re talking about in PowerPoint presentations, town hall meetings, all this kind of stuff. We’ve seen all this. I know sometimes it might be just tempting to, well, my software allows me to just throw a PDF or even a PowerPoint slide up there, I’ll just throw that up on the screens. But I think this is a mistake. You can use that as sort of source material, but you need to adapt it to the digital signage medium, I think. What are some of the, like, mistakes people make?
Melissa Sartin: Off the bat, the biggest one I see is just trying to include too much content for the space, especially paragraphs. When you’re trying to convey data, avoid paragraphs, because people just kinda lose interest and mentally snooze off and then they get bored and then they just walk away. So, you really wanna kind of cull down to what’s the most important, what are you trying to get across.
Derek DeWitt: So, you gotta find that balance between get across the right amount of information presented in a simple enough way that people can kind of very quickly grasp it.
Melissa Sartin: Yeah. And if that’s something you’re really struggling with, that there’s just so much content and it’s all important and it all has to get out there, then you know, you can include some of it and perhaps include a call to action to learn more or speak to so and so to find out more about this. And that can at least pique people’s interest to follow up and get the rest of the content that you just can’t fit on there.
Derek DeWitt: Right. Just take a QR code and go, hey, scan for more.
Melissa Sartin: Right. Exactly.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. I even can imagine a sort of an almost gamified way. You put up, I don’t know, a pie chart or bar graph and, you have like, I dunno, a question mark or a frowny face next to some things and a smiley face next to other things, but you don’t label any of it. Then you just put a QR code and go, wanna know what this is? Scan to find out.
Melissa Sartin: Or, I don’t know, maybe you, you know, you gamify it and incentivize it that, you know, if you download this or if you read this article and fill out the questionnaire at the end, you can be entered to win a $100 gift card. I don’t know.
Derek DeWitt: There you go, there you go. Tangible prizes at the end of it.
What about using color? I think color is important. Like you wouldn’t want to do a complex visual that’s all using shades of green, for example. That would be a mistake, or would it not be?
Melissa Sartin: That’s a great example. Unless you have really good contrasting shades of green that all work well together, it’s not something I would recommend for a couple reasons. One being that the colors are all gonna kind of blend together, especially from a distance. So it, and especially if you have a little legend at the bottom that this screen means this and this screen means that, and you’re trying to look back and forth, well, wait, is this that shade or that shade?
And additionally, this is, you know, this kind of gets left behind a lot, you wanna consider people who have either poor vision or vision impairments. They may not be able to tell at all what’s, you know, going on. If someone’s colorblind, for instance, they may all just blend into one color for them. So that’s something really important to consider.
And it’s a good idea when you’re thinking through this and designing these to go online and run it past an ADA compliance checker. There are lots of websites that will scan for visual DA compliance.
Derek DeWitt: What about using motion? You know, obviously you don’t wanna, I mean, maybe you could do a short video with no sound. But even just, you know, having little, I don’t know, little call outs or, you know, one of the sections of the pie chart floats out or something like that. Like, is this a good idea or is that, are you just really doing a lot of extra work for really not much impact on the audience side?
Melissa Sartin: No, it can definitely be helpful, and it can definitely drive home certain points. You just have to be intentional with how you do it, you know, and you don’t wanna call out too many pieces. Every time you have something moving on screen, you’re instinctually gonna look at it, and it’s gonna shift your focus from whatever you were reading or whatever you were looking at. And, you know, sometimes just a subtle movement in your background is enough to catch somebody’s eye as they’re, you know, walking by. But sometimes, like you said, maybe a pie piece floats out, or it zooms in for a second and that’s enough to grab your attention.
Really, you just want to avoid too much, too intense. You don’t want those cheesy, like cube transition blows up into a starburst and then, you know, spins around four times. It needs to be sparingly, and it needs to be intentional.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. It’s funny how I think that’s come from the PowerPoint world. PowerPoint, you know, over the years was like, look, we’re pretty much the same product, but you know, we keep upping our prices, so we have to give some kind of extra value to our customers. Let’s come up with yet more transitions. I mean, there are so many transitions, that, Camtasia, like all these transitions, most of which at least in my opinion stink. I don’t like hardly any. I’m like, what’s wrong with just a cut or a fade or a slide? I don’t need to see it turning into squares and then each square rotates separately. Like this is a waste of my time as an audience member.
Melissa Sartin: Yeah. Exactly. And I get it. It’s tempting. It’s very tempting. They’re fun and they’re cool. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the phrase, you know, we really wanna make it pop, we want wow factor. But if the wow factor completely obliterates the focus of your content, then your content’s kind of pointless.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, that’s true. And the wow factor shouldn’t be a transition.
Melissa Sartin: Exactly.
Derek DeWitt: What should, so somebody says, hey, we want, we want this to really pop, we want a wow factor. Like, what would you do? How could you do it?
Melissa Sartin: Well, the first thing you would wanna do in that scenario is establish your information hierarchy and your visual hierarchy, because we can only really look at one spot at a time. So, you have to highlight the most important point, which could, you know you could do that through the size, maybe it’s slightly bigger than the rest of the content. Maybe it has more color. Maybe the header is a little bit different.
You know, there’s a bunch of ways you can do that. But you want to kind of guide the viewer’s eye from most important down to least important. And that’s really what’s gonna give your content punch. Somebody’s gonna walk away feeling like they actually learned something or absorbed something.
Derek DeWitt: Right. Which is quite a feat in, you know, what are we talking about here? 10 seconds, 12 seconds, 15 max probably?
Melissa Sartin: Yeah, we have really short attention spans. Thank you doom scrolling. So…
Derek DeWitt: Well, and it’s the nature of digital signage, too. I mean, you could leave it up for a whole minute if you wanted to, if it was that important and it had that much info. But again, unless it’s in a break room or a place where people are lingering, I don’t know how good an idea that is. I mean, if I’m walking through a lobby, I’m not gonna stop, oh, let me just look at this graph and figure it out and read the key. Like, I’m not gonna do that.
Melissa Sartin: Well, and that’s a great point too, is you really want to consider the context of where your display is. Is it in a high traffic, high volume area? Is it in kind of a quieter hallway? How big is it? How high is it mounted off the ground? You know, how far away can you get from it? All of these things play into catching somebody’s eye.
Derek DeWitt: I know a thing a lot of people in internal communications are talking about these days is using “storytelling techniques”. This is one of those many buzzwords floating around on there on LinkedIn and people writing their little, you know, expert posts and blogs and things (though I don’t know that they’re actually using the term correctly all the time). But you know, the general idea is like, hey, we’re gonna tell a story either through a series of connected messages over time with certain visual elements. Could be a little mascot, it could be just branded colors, it could be a sort of an icon or a logo, whatever. But we’re gonna give you this impression that there’s information unfolding in some way in an almost like a narrative sense.
Is it possible to do that with things like this, if I’m doing KPIs or energy usage in the building, or how our recycling program is, you know, operating in real time or even just, hey, here’s some stuff up on the digital signs about how the market is doing or how our stocks are doing? Is there a way to incorporate those storytelling techniques into that? Or are these just, here’s the info, bye.
Melissa Sartin: No, no, you can absolutely “tell a story” with it. And it really comes down to planning and consistency. You need to have all stakeholders kind of on board about what terminology do you use and how do you use it? Are there specific terms or phrases within your organization? Being sure to use them correctly and consistently.
And like you mentioned, color. Color’s actually a great way to do it because it’s instant, it doesn’t really require conscious thought. You know, maybe purple might correspond to your quarterly sales figures. Every time someone sees purple instinctually after some time, they’re gonna think, oh, that’s quarterly sales, I wonder how we did this quarter. And they’re gonna look up.
Derek DeWitt: Right. So, something just that simple can actually be kind of a storytelling technique.
Melissa Sartin: Yeah. You don’t wanna switch it up for no reason. If you have to change something like that, again, do it with intention. Why do we have to change this? Is it really worth it? Is it gonna disrupt people’s understanding of what we’ve set up for our storytelling methods?
For example, I worked on a project for a college, and they have different campaigns throughout the year with different corresponding colors. So, for example, orange might relate to campus safety. So, on their display, their logo changes to an orange version for the months of that campaign. And then green is for health information and for those months it changes to green. And when there’s not a specific campaign, it just changes to their standard logo. So, in that scenario, they very clearly and very intentionally have separated those colors out to mean something. So, when students pass by and they see it, they know, oh, okay, it’s safety month. Let’s see what tips they have today.
Derek DeWitt: That’s it. Like, as long as it’s intentional, like you say, as long as you’re not like, well, I guess today we’ll make it red and then tomorrow we’ll make it yellow. That’s just gonna confuse people. There’s no purpose to that. But as long as it’s intentional and consistent, I think it’s actually smart. People might not even consciously clock why they’re clueing in or how they understand, oh, this is about our recycling program, ’cause it’s green, or this is about enrollment, ’cause it’s blue. They might not even really be able to articulate it. They’ll just know it almost instinctually.
Melissa Sartin: Yeah, exactly. And actually, if your organization has a really robust brand standards, color standards, a lot of times they’ve already laid this out for you. They’ve decided this color means this, and this means this. Now it’s not always the case. And your organization may not even really have a set brand standard. In which case I would recommend, you know, again, go online, choose a color palette generator, and it’ll help you.
The one thing I would say about that is keep in mind what type of company or organization you’re doing this for. You know, if you’re a manufacturer that creates heavy machinery, pastel pink and lavender probably aren’t great color choices. So, just keep that in mind. And again, keep in mind color contrast to really punch up your design. Give that wow factor.
Derek DeWitt: Right. Like you said, there’s a lot of stuff out there now. Even if you’re not a designer, you don’t have any training in it. You’ve been just handed the digital signage system and told, here go do stuff. Even people who are, let’s call them amateurs or professionals in waiting, there’s a ton of stuff out there now. Just Google it as a complete question. You don’t even need to think of keywords anymore. Google uses AI now and it’s smart enough to, you can actually ask like a question like you would a person, and it will answer you. And it might even give you an accurate answer.
Melissa Sartin: Yeah. And honestly, as a professional who’s been doing this for 14 years, I’ve leveraged AI. And in that regard, I have to come up, you know, with certain color schemes for refreshing content. We wanna give it a new look, a new feel. And I’m just, you know, can’t really think of anything off the top of my head. I’ll go and ask AI, hey, what are some colors that would go well with this type of project, with this theme? And just, you know, if nothing else, that gives you a jumping off point.
Derek DeWitt: Right, exactly. Right. As I always say, don’t just copy and paste, don’t just do whatever your AI master told you to do. It’s a collaboration tool. It’s like having an extra mind on the problem. And sometimes it says crazy things. You say, what colors would be good? And it says squirrel! And you go, okay, so.
Melissa Sartin: Yeah.
Derek DeWitt: Talking about different tools, obviously AxisTV Signage Suite, our product, has a lot of data integration and automation tools as well. And obviously, when you’re doing designing stuff, you’re using that system.
Melissa Sartin: Yeah. So, you can set up through our widget features, connections to different types of content, whether it’s Excel, whether it’s different types of calendars, whether it’s JSON files and other types of content that, once you’ve set that connection up and, say you’re using Excel, you can just update the Excel document. You don’t have to go into Signage Suite and update it there. It will just automatically pull the new content for you. So, it’s not quite set it and forget it, but it definitely cuts down the steps to updating your content.
Derek DeWitt: And I know data mapping’s a bit of a different thing, but it’s related. And one of the things that we use, we’ve got widget controllers for like artwork and text changes and conditional formatting, things like that as well in the software.
Melissa Sartin: Yeah. And one of them that I use quite frequently, and it’s a built-in widget with Signage Suite, is our data mapped artwork. Now, this is great for things like fundraisers, because you can link to your data source and then set up, you know, say it’s a ribbon and it’s filled in into tenths, like it starts at the bottom and then it moves up 10%, 10%, 10% until it’s filled up totally. And you can set it up to say, okay, when the value is between 450 and 600, I want you to show this piece of artwork.
Derek DeWitt: Which is the ribbon filled this much.
Melissa Sartin: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, maybe that’s the ribbon filled halfway. And then when you change that number in your Excel file and it suddenly goes to 750, now the conditional formatting tells you that, okay, now I want you to show this image that’s filled up a little bit more. And again, you set that up one time, you set all the conditions for it in your design, and then as you update the Excel, it just automatically fills in.
And like I said, this is great for fundraisers, this is great for if you’re showing, like, quarterly KPI data and maybe it was a great quarter, and the number denotes to show a smiley face. And maybe it wasn’t so great, and the number denotes to show a frowny face. So, there are a ton of ways you can do this.
Derek DeWitt: And a lot, whether you’re using things like smiley faces or something perhaps a bit more, I don’t know, grown up; a lot of that would depend on your company culture, I think.
Melissa Sartin: Yeah, for sure. You set the look and feel of that to be pretty much anything you want. The data mapping and the conditional formatting works the same. It’s really up to you to decide what you want the visual style to be.
Derek DeWitt: Right, right, right. Now, does it work the same for room signs or are there differences?
Melissa Sartin: There are differences of how the data is pulled in, but it is another example of data mapping or data integration. You know, we’ve had a lot of popularity with, not only room signs showing what’s scheduled for the day or what’s scheduled right now, but also for hoteling and hot desking of Susie Smith has this desk until 4:30 today. And that can be really useful, especially in hybrid workplaces.
Derek DeWitt: And I’m just gonna put it out there, Visix does have an award-winning design team, which you are a part of, that can certainly do it for you if you can talk your boss into paying for it
Melissa Sartin: Yeah, we definitely, we’re good at what we do. And if all of this is too intimidating, you don’t know where to begin, you just, it’s just too much, we are happy to help.
Derek DeWitt: Absolutely. But let’s say I went to the boss, boss said, you know what, why don’t you give it the old college try? But I don’t really even know where to begin. Like where would I begin? What would be, like, my first four steps?
Melissa Sartin: So, the first step would be planning. Before you ever get to the design software, you need to know what do you wanna show? Why do you wanna show it? Who are you targeting? And how much should be there? Again, everyone who’s involved in that process should really get together and decide what that is. I know that can sometimes be frustrating. Everyone’s got different ideas.
So, what’s helpful to know about that is you can always change it. You can always cull down; you can always put different content on there. And one thing that’s really useful to do once you get to the design phase, which I’ll go back and talk about, is to put it up on the screen and look at it. Look at it in the real world on the actual display. Because I can tell you from experience, looking at it on a computer monitor is not the same. And, you know, when you’ve been staring at the same design for 6, 12, 18 hours, you kind of become blind to it. So, you wanna get outside input.
Now, for the design part itself, I would say start as simple as you can. You don’t want too many unnecessary visual elements. You really want your content to be the star of the show. You wanna maximize the area dedicated to it. And that’s not to say you can’t incorporate your branding, you can’t incorporate visual elements that help reinforce that messaging. It’s just, again, to say you don’t want to overwhelm it simply for wow factor. I’m gonna keep going back to that ’cause I’ve heard it so many times. A lot of people tend to take the pressure of “I’m designing” to mean I need to create a da Vinci masterpiece.
Derek DeWitt: Right. This is something I’ve said a lot, which is like, hey folks, calm down. You’re not gonna win an award.
Melissa Sartin: Well, maybe you will, you never know.
Derek DeWitt: I mean, maybe, but I don’t think that should be your goal.
Melissa Sartin: No, it definitely shouldn’t be your goal. Your goal should be communicating clearly to your audience because that’s truly the award if you get your message across. That’s what you’re aiming for.
Derek DeWitt: That’s true. Aim for reward, not award.
Melissa Sartin: There you go. I like that.
Derek DeWitt: Well, always interesting stuff. Please keep in mind everybody, design, we’ve got a ton of stuff out there about that topic. We’ve got blogs, previous podcast episodes, we’ve got masterclass guides, and in there as well, we talk about some of the specifics of designing for data visualizations and data integration and all the like.
Many of the things I’ve talked about today with my guest. But of course, she brought a fresh perspective onto the subject because she does this day in and day out. This is what she does. And so, of course she’s thinking about it all the time. So, she was the perfect person to talk to, and I’d like to thank you for coming on.
She is Melissa Sartin, senior creative content artist for Visix. And we’ve been talking about designing data visualizations for digital signage. Thanks Melissa, for talking to me.
Melissa Sartin: Thanks for having me on. I hope what I had to say was helpful. And I just gotta say I love what I do, and I hope everybody will love it too once they give it a try.
Derek DeWitt: There you go. And I’d like to remind everybody again that there is a transcript on the Visix website where you can read along with the conversation we just had, and there will be many helpful links to some of the things we referenced as well.