Touchscreens: screensaver and time-out
In my career I've worked on tons of touchscreens, mostly to be displayed at healthcare conventions and interacted with by HCPs who are wandering from booth to booth. These are usually pretty fun projects!
A lot of people think of touchscreens as easy — they're basically just microsites, right? Well, they can be easy, and they can be like microsites, but there are a few important considerations to keep in mind.
When I've been in creative reviews for touchscreens, usually the team has done a good job of laying out the various screens of content and adhering to the specs for things like pixel dimensions and screen orientation, and they've designed the screens to be non-scrolling, etc. But there are two big pieces that are often missing:
Screensaver
Unlike a website, the touchscreen has to be doing something before the user interacts with it. This is usually some kind of simple looping animation.
For this screensaver, we want to design something that's eye-catching, so that people will notice it from outside of the booth and hopefully become interested. The simplest version of this is several full-screen images that cross-fade through each other, on a loop. Consider a large logo, and/or very large words; something bold and provocative. A looping slideshow screensaver can be animated programmatically by a developer. Another option is to use a full-screen looping video (e.g. an mp4 file, embedded in an html page) for the screensaver.
Somewhere on the screensaver we should display instructions like "Tap anywhere to begin." The user taps, the screensaver is dismissed, and they arrive at the home screen.
Time-out feature
Interactive touchscreens should also have a time-out functionality, so that the screen goes back to the looping screensaver after a certain number of seconds of inactivity.
Now, this shouldn't just be an invisible countdown that automatically goes back to the screensaver after [X] seconds. What if the user is standing and looking at the content for a long time? We don't want to just jump back to the screensaver while they're standing there reading the screen; that would be a terrible user experience. A time-out popup fixes this.
Example: after [X] seconds of inactivity, the screen becomes covered with a 50% gray mask, and a popup appears with the message, "Tap anywhere to continue." If the user taps the screen within [Y] seconds, the time out popup is dismissed, and they're back at the same screen of content where they were before. If the user does not tap within [Y] seconds, that means they've probably (/definitely?) wandered away, and the screen goes back to the looping screensaver.
The creative team should lay out this time-out popup and provide direction for the developer on timing. Showing the actual countdown of seconds on-screen (like an old arcade game!) is optional; this might feel needlessly stressful (like an old arcade game!). If they're there, they'll tap, if they're not, it'll time out.
Invisible button
This isn't a thing that needs to be designed, but rather an extra piece of functionality to consider: Some teams opt to program an invisible button into a corner of the touchscreen, so that the moderator working the booth can quickly set the touchscreen back to the screensaver when a user walks away.
(Way way way TMI: I've had some teams/clients express concern about this: "What if the user taps the invisible button by mistake?" Okay, easy fix: the dev team can program any type of sequence of invisible buttons that we desire, e.g. the moderator in the booth has to tap the lower-left corner and then the lower-right corner to jump back to the screensaver. This is pretty simple to program, but it sure feels like overkill!)
And that's it! These things are easy to think through and design, but too often they're forgotten. So put 'em in your checklist and you'll be good.
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.