The Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center has grown over 50+ years, expanding to several locations and adding to their main Baton Rouge hub. Their communications with the public are as state of the art as their radiation therapy. Their website offers ease of navigation with a rich, deep information offering. When they wanted an on-site visitor experience to match, Visix creative services designed an interactive donor board and a touchscreen information board with interactive wayfinding, multiple directories, event listings, a services overview and digital signage messaging.
The two interactive projects are custom branded with similar portrait layouts for ease of navigation. Both feature time, date and weather to attract attention, and feature a message playlist that rotates through news, welcomes and visitor announcements at the top of the screen. The interactive sections on the lower halves of the screens are the only difference.
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Both designs are easy to use yet rich in detail. The interactive donor board highlights donors and fundraising campaigns and lists ways to support the Center. The touchscreen information board assists hospital visitors in locating staff and events, and gives general information about the services on offer.
A directory of medical professionals and facilities is sortable by name, department and floor. A search icon below this scrollable list brings up a box and on-screen keyboard, so visitors can simply enter the name of who they’re looking for. Once they know their destination, the campus map displays a color-coded map with a legend to the left, and a scrollable list of destinations on the right. Tapping one of the destinations drops a pin on the map to show exactly where it is in the 64,000 square foot complex.
An upcoming events calendar is another embedded directory, with each event name, date, start time and location, and the whole thing can be sorted according to each category. An additional info button to the right of each entry pops up a text box with a detailed description, plus additional information like maximum number of participants. Another search icon at the bottom lets people enter the event name if they already know it and don’t want to sift through the entire directory.
The support services screen shows a submenu with four categories: patient navigation, survivorship, nutritional services and guest services. Touching one of these gives a brief description of that area of interest, and provides a link to contacts for those services. For example, looking at Nutrition Services lets a visitor tap a button to Locate Your Dietician, which then shows dieticians from the directory, along with their telephone numbers and which floor they’re on.
The final section of the touchscreen information board features a quick text explanation and video about Healing Arts – the therapeutic potential of visual arts to stimulate healing – and works by regional artists that are displayed throughout the Center.
Both the donor board and info board are ADA compliant, with interactivity in the lower part of displays for accessibility and zoom controls for the visually impaired. Navigating through all the screens is made easier with interactive breadcrumbs and “back and “home” buttons on every screen.
And these aren’t just easy for visitors – they’re also designed for the convenience of the Center’s digital signage managers. Events are pulled in from an Exchange server, so changes to calendars are updated automatically on screens. Directories for both the information board and donor board are managed using a database and custom UI webpage created by Visix. This lets content managers batch import all directories at once, or change only selected items. Text descriptions and photos for events can be added, edited or deleted in the same web interface.
Taken all together, the Center’s info-rich communications offering – the website, the touchscreen information board and the interactive donor board – gives visitors what they need in a quick and stress-free way, so patients and their families can focus on the business of healing.