Whether you’re designing a website, writing a press release, or coming up with text to appear on a digital signage screen, common sense dictates that you should use the same words that your audience does. Yet I continue to see digital signage that’s full of obscure terms. Have you ever asked your spouse to “turn up the HVAC”? I don’t think so — regular humans say “turn up the heat” or “turn down the air conditioning”. In short, if you fail to speak the same language as your audience, they may have trouble understanding the message or might just ignore it entirely.

When in doubt, read the message out loud, and get rid of any lesser-known words and acronyms. The goal is to achieve near-100% comprehension of your messaging, and that means using the same vocabulary as your viewers. Ideally, the digital signage system you select should make it easy to change messages without having to create new content from scratch. My company’s EasyStart product does just that, providing a simple, easy and affordable digital signage solution for smaller projects. While EasyStart can’t write the content for you, it certainly makes the task of updating and refining your messages a lot easier.

People naturally gravitate towards tasks that are easy and avoid ones that are hard. Accordingly, the odds that you’ll make the necessary improvements to your digital signage content are much greater when you have technology that allows for easy and hassle-free updates. Otherwise, you may become overly committed to a piece of content that’s clearly not optimal, and you’ll resist changing it simply because the process is a pain.