Apart from curating the most informative and engaging exhibits for your museum, have you thought about investing in museum digital signage?
Your museum’s signs help provide directions to exhibits and educate visitors on the exhibits themselves. While physical signs can do this job decently, there are reasons to switch to digital signage as you strive to keep museum attendance high.
Read on as we share five compelling benefits that upgrading to digital signage can bring to your museum.
1. Update museum information on the fly
To update a physical museum sign, you’d need to:
- redesign the sign,
- print it out (multiple times if you have more than one of it),
- hunt it down in your museum, and finally
- replace it with your new sign.
Repeat this process for every sign that needs updating. And given how heavily museums rely on signs, updating them this way can be quite a chore!
Digital signs eliminate such hassle as you can redesign your sign online, then sync the changes to your museums’ displays. Your screens will instantly update, giving your visitors the latest info right away!
Such convenience was exactly what Birmingham Museum Trust wanted when it searched for a digital signage partner for Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum. Among other things, the trust wanted to be able to easily update Thinktank’s opening times, ticket prices, and events on its screens.
Working with digital signage provider Signagelive, Birmingham Museum Trust eventually installed gorgeous display panels like these ones at Thinktank:
P.S. If you’re keen on using SignageLive for your own digital signage needs, you’ll love our built-in SignageLive integration!
With it, you can create your signage designs in PosterMyWall, then seamlessly export them to SignageLive for displaying on your screens. More details on our SignageLive integration here.
2. Communicate more information within a limited space
Is your museum collection especially large? Due to space constraints, you may not be able to display everything within your museum premises. And even if you could, you may not want to if some exhibits are especially fragile.
Using interactive displays for museums, however, you can represent the exhibit in digital format for visitors to interact with. You can also set up each display to store data on multiple exhibits, then let visitors toggle between the different exhibits as they please.
This way, you won’t have to allocate physical space for every museum exhibit you intend to showcase.
For example, take a look at how Darwins Aviation Museum presents airfields information in an interactive digital display:
Visitors can tap the various display icons to bring up information on different airfields and their planes. All from just one screen!
3. Offer fully immersive exhibits
Imagine that you have a digital display that isn’t the size of your typical museum signboard, but that spans the entire length of your wall. You also have such a display on your other wall. And perhaps even your floor and ceiling, too.
The result? A 360-degree, visual experience that completely immerses your museum visitors as they step into the room. It’ll be as if you’ve transported them to another world.
For inspiration on this concept, look no further than what the Mori Building Digital Art Museum in Tokyo has done.
Dubbing itself the first digital art museum, the museum contains more than 50 large digital artworks that visitors can walk through, touch, and even play with.
4. Provide a personalized museum experience
Since museum galleries feature a fixed number of exhibits at any one time, you might think that you’d have to give all visitors the same experience when they drop by. But this isn’t true!
When you install a museum video display, you can let visitors indicate their preferences on the screen, which then tailors the content they see accordingly.
Check out how this Twitter user interacted with a digital screen in the Rubin Museum of Art to see what we mean:
The screen first displayed a variety of emotions and invited the visitor to select one that most interested them. When they did so, they could read a teaching about that particular emotion.
After that, the screen goes on to share the percentages of visitors that had chosen each respective emotion. Just a fun tidbit of information for visitors to see how others have interacted with the same screen!
5. Gather feedback on the most popular exhibits
As a museum exhibition draws to a close, you may want to know how popular it has been with visitors. While you could find out by surveying your visitors, did you know your digital signs can share feedback, too?
Especially sophisticated digital signs can track every touch on them, providing valuable data on:
- which digital exhibits your visitors have been tapping, and
- how many views they have gotten.
You can then use such insights to plan your upcoming exhibitions—and boost your visitor numbers!
Case in point: the ArtLens Wall at The Cleveland Museum of Art.
As visitors browse the art displayed on this digital wall, they can also choose to “favorite” and share them. The wall keeps a record of such data, helping the museum’s staff to learn the artworks that visitors have been interacting with the most.
Upgrade your museum tech to foster richer visitor experiences
Keen to implement museum digital signage (and reaping the benefits we’ve shared above)? Then think about the content you want to display on your signs and how you will create it.
PosterMyWall makes the signage content creation process easy, offering digital display templates you can customize using a beginner-friendly design editor. Here are some templates to get museum signage ideas from:
Our partnerships with digital signage providers like SignageLive, Fugo, Raydiant, and others also lets you effortlessly transfer your PosterMyWall signage designs to their platforms with just a few clicks. Any changes you make to your signage designs will be immediately synced across, ensuring that your digital signage playlist is always up to date.
Learn more about our digital signage partnerships in the guides below:
- Create your own digital signage content with PosterMyWall and Fugo
- PosterMyWall live class in collaboration with Raydiant: Create dynamic digital signage
- PosterMyWall live class in collaboration with Display5: Promote effortlessly with digital signage
You can also browse other digital signage resources on the Gradient blog here.
