A good lobby screen is one presentation of five to eight pictures, each up for about 8 seconds, that plays by itself and starts over at the end. You set it up once, leave it on the lobby TV, and change a picture only when something changes. Here’s what to put on it and how to set it up.

What a lobby screen is for

People in a lobby are walking, talking, holding coffee and children. Nobody stops to read a screen. They glance at it for a few seconds on the way past, or while they wait in line.

So a lobby screen isn’t a noticeboard. It’s a few short messages, one at a time, that someone can take in at a glance:

  • a welcome, and where first-time guests should go,
  • where to check children in,
  • the one event this month you most want people at,
  • coffee, and where to find it,
  • what happens midweek, like a Wednesday night,
  • how to get connected.

If you can’t say it in a headline and one line, it belongs in the bulletin or on the website, not on the lobby screen.

Five to eight pictures, one message each

Count how long the whole thing takes to go round. Six pictures at 8 seconds each is under a minute, so someone waiting for coffee sees all of it. Fifteen pictures is two minutes, and most people never see the last ten.

The Lobby welcome presentation in Displayte: Always available, on the Check-in and Lobby TVs, with its four pictures in order, 8 seconds each: welcome-home, check-in, coffees-on-us and wednesday-night.

Keep it short. When you add a new picture, take an old one out.

How long each picture should stay up

A simple rule: long enough to read it out loud twice. For a headline and one short line, that’s about 6 to 8 seconds. For an event with a date and a place, closer to 10 or 12.

In Displayte, a presentation has one picture time for all its pictures, anywhere from 3 to 60 seconds, starting at 8. So make your lobby pictures about the same length, and set the time for the longest one.

Lobby welcome’s Playback in Displayte: By itself, looping is chosen, and Each picture is set to 8 s.

Between pictures there’s a short fade. Nothing to choose: it’s set for you.

Make it readable from across the room

The lobby is bigger than a classroom, and people see the screen from further away and at an angle.

  • Big, plain type. A headline should be readable from the far side of the lobby.
  • Few words. A headline and one line. If it needs a paragraph, it’s the wrong place.
  • High contrast. Light on dark, or dark on light. No words over a busy photo.
  • The TV’s shape. Make every picture 16:9, like 1920 by 1080 pixels. Displayte never crops what you made, so a picture in another shape shows whole, with bars at the edges.

Set it up once

Here’s the whole setup in Displayte. It takes a few minutes.

  1. On Presentations, choose New presentation. Call it “Lobby welcome” and choose Always available: it has no date, so it stays out of the Sunday list.
  2. Under How should it play?, choose By itself, looping, and set Each picture to the time you chose.
  3. Choose your pictures with Choose from the Library. You can put them in order in the presentation afterwards.
  4. Tick the lobby TV. Before you make it, it tells you what will happen: “Lobby will start playing Lobby welcome as soon as it’s on.” Then choose Create presentation. The lobby TV has it within a minute.
  5. If the lobby TV had anything else on it, choose Manage Display on its card on Displays, untick everything but “Lobby welcome”, and choose Save.
The Lobby TV’s presentations on its own page in Displayte: only Lobby welcome ticked, and above Save, the sentence Lobby will start playing Lobby welcome as soon as it’s on.

From then on, the lobby TV plays the pictures in order and starts over after the last one, all day, with nobody touching it. If the Wi-Fi drops, it keeps playing what it has.

Put the lobby TV’s remote somewhere safe. Once it’s playing, the screen doesn’t need it, and a curious child with a remote can take it off the welcome.

Keep it current without a weekly chore

A lobby screen goes stale in one way: an event that’s already happened is still on it. People notice, and they stop looking.

Make it part of your weekly routine. When you set up Sunday, look at the lobby presentation for ten seconds and ask one question: is anything on it over? If so, take that picture out, or swap in the next event.

Because the lobby TV has the presentation, not a copy of it, a change you make reaches every TV that has it within a minute. If the check-in desk has its own screen showing the same welcome, one edit changes both.

Keep the pictures that never change, like the welcome and the coffee, and rotate only the one or two that do.

The demo has a Lobby welcome set up this way, playing by itself on its Lobby and Check-in TVs.