Overview
With the ITS Digital Signage service, there are two types of digital signs: static and interactive. Static signs allow you to display information, like news, advertisements and announcements. Interactive signs are those with touch screens and kiosks that allow users to interact with the sign to find directions, access staff directories and more. This document outlines how interactivity works on the interactive signs.
Interactivity means triggering the play of content (or some other behavior) in one or more regions of the sign as a result of a user interacting with a particular region, content item, content field, or Live Data row on the screen. This interaction is most often the result of a user touching a touchscreen-enabled display, but can also result from a mouse click in the preview area of Content Manager or through a mouse click on any sign that has a mouse connected to its player machine. Interactivity only refers to actions that are directly configured into Content Manager.
Interactivity and Row Interactivity
Interactivity is configured by selecting the Interactivity option from a context (right-click) menu for any of the following objects.
- A template region on a template in the network tree
- A template region in the design view
- A content item in the network tree
- A content item in the design view
- A content field in a layout dialog (i.e., in Live Data, weather, date and time, or control pad content types)
- A pagination field in a Live Data layout dialog
Interactivity can only be configured for templates and content items that have been added to the network tree because interactivity is specific to the context of the template and content being shown on a sign. Items in the Content Library and Template Library cannot be configured for interactivity.
Play Triggers means triggering the play of content (or some other behavior) in one or more regions in conjunction with the start of a particular piece of content. This is useful (for example) when you want to play a list of product features in a region anytime a particular product video begins playing.
Here too, triggered behaviors can only be configured for content items that have been scheduled in a region because play triggers are specific to the context of the template and content being shown on a sign. Items in the Content Library cannot be configured for play triggers.
Behaviors
The Click Behavior dialogue is displayed as soon as you select Interactivity or Row interactivity as described above. This dialogue is used to identify the template, region and action that will be affected by the interactive occurrence.
Behaviors List and New/Delete/Move Buttons:
- Behaviors - This area lists any behaviors that have already been defined.
- New - adds an item to the Behavior list. At least one behavior is needed although multiple behaviors may be triggered by a single interaction. When the New button is clicked, or an existing behavior is highlighted in the Behavior list, the remaining fields for setting up interactivity are enabled.
- Delete - Removes an existing click behavior.
- Move Up or Move Down - Changes the order of items in the Behaviors list; this also changes the order in which the interactivity behaviors are actually handled. (In software versions prior to 4.0.1, the buttons do not exist, so you must delete and re-add behaviors to change their order.)
Gesture and Direction
For setup of interactive touch behaviors:
- Touch is the default interactivity option. In versions prior to 4.5, it is the only interactivity option and applies to touch-screen behavior (or click behavior is a keyboard is present). In version 4.5, choose Touch if you do not want to use swipe behaviors or if your hardware does not support swipe gesturing.
- Direction is available if you selected Swipe above. Choose a direction (Any, Left, Right, Up, or Down) for this interactive behavior. For example, you could create a behavior that would make a swipe in any direction advance the content. Or, using the available directions left/right/up/down, you could create from one to four interactive swipe behaviors for a single item or region, so that up to four different things could happen depending on the direction of the user's swipe..