My latest project was working with the City of Boulder’s Parks & Recreation department on their facility displays. The city operates three indoor recreational facilities and have recently bought a 52″ monitor for each center to display departmental news and marketing material to the patrons. My job was to design the User Experience for the displays and determine the best strategy to arrange content to be displayed in an organized and informative way.
The requirements for the displays were pretty straightforward. The city wanted to display a variety of content including promotional material, videos and images. They also wanted to display a weather forecast and the city’s RSS feed. The city chose to use a display content management system from Four Winds Interactive, my job was to design a template to display the content. Each monitor had a resolution of 1920 x 1080 to work with. The results that I came up with are what I believe to be the most efficient way to display the desired content within the space available.
The first thing that I did when I began designing the layout for the displays was to divide the space using the rule of thirds. I wanted 2/3rds of the space to be used for the main content area and the last third for 2 smaller content areas. Since HD video would be used on the display at some point, I decided to make the content areas all 16 x 9. The city’s original template had a large 8.5 x 11 content area. Their original plan was to take print material and put it up on the digital displays. I explained to them that print media and digital media are two entirely different entities. Just because it works for print does not in any way mean that it will work for another medium. In this case, large pictures and bold headlines will work best to attract an individual’s attention.
Finally, I designed a basic template for 16 x 9 content. However, it will be up to the Parks & Recreation department to keep the content current and informative. The facility displays went live two weeks ago and so far the feedback has been very positive. The biggest factor will be how often the content gets changed. Once the public acknowledges that the displays are a good source of relevant information they will be looked upon as a very good resource.
