Digital Displays, Next Steps

By David McKelvey

As you all have hopefully seen, the campus digital displays launched on Wednesday and we’ve received a lot of great, positive feedback on them since. Thanks to those of you that have given us kudos — please be sure to thank everyone I noted in my previous post too.

That said, nothing ever sits for long in New Media. Since we launched the displays early, I had to cut some of the features that we had planned for the launch. Below is a list of some of the things that I hope to add to the displays (and their website) in the coming weeks and months.

Emergency Notification

These screens would compliment our other emergency notification methods quite well and it has always been part of the plan to be able to take some or all of them over during a crisis. I’ll be coding this new feature in pretty early along our roadmap “just in case.”

Home Page Featured Events

The home page featured events are not being pushed to the displays yet. They are actually LiveWhale news — a needed workaround for launch two years ago. That workaround is no longer needed, so I expect we’ll make the switch to events in the coming weeks and they’ll flow through akin to any other event.

Website

So you’re walking by a screen and you just missed something that you thought might interest you… For this situation, we had planned to also have a website where people could see a list of events currently on the screens (and a little ahead or back). This website would also be where people could flag inappropriate content.

Filtering

It’s taking a bit for people to learn how the filtering works, ourselves included, and it’s still a little rough around the edges. For example, we’ve learned that it’s useless to push a five-day event like undergraduate NSO to the screens as that’s not helpful. Instead, we should take the major events within NSO and enter those. Think from the perspective of the viewer: having an event on the screen all day saying NSO is today is pretty useless from a user standpoint, whereas displaying an event that says Parents’ Dinner 4:30-6:30 p.m. is far more useful.

You may also see events that might not belong. If you see something on the screens that you feel is inappropriate for your channel (undergraduate, graduate, law) let us know so we can investigate. (It might be a bug, or it might be correct but a bad choice on the part of the creator, or it might be something we hadn’t foreseen.)

Events Push

Being so new, there are still a few bugs in the system, specifically one where a few events that should flow over are not. It’s a small percentage of the events, but I haven’t yet been able to track it down. If you get an event that isn’t appearing and should be, please send me the LiveWhale event id so I can investigate.

LiveWhale Preview of an Event on the Displays

We had really wanted to have a preview for you available from within LiveWhale. As I’ve no idea yet how I’ll accomplish this, but it’s an idea for our roadmap.

LiveWhale News

I expect that we’ll add LiveWhale News to the screens at some point. This will probably not be all LiveWhale news, since that would be overwhelming and many news stories aren’t a good fit for being useful information on the screens. But, for some subset that resembles announcements for lack of a better term, I expect to come up with a means to send them to the screens at some point down the line.

Have a great idea?

We’re looking for your feedback on the digital displays. What would you do?

Questions or comments? Email me.