ECNlive

Digital display network

ECNlive

ecn_allThose of you working within the City of London may already be familiar with the screens adorning almost every highrise in the capital. 

As a digital display network, they provide a real time mix of live news, travel and weather updates and relevant content via full motion display panels. Placed in a high dwell time areas by office reception areas, ECN’s modern displays have become synonymous in the central business districts of not only London, but also by expansion to Paris, too. 

They now have a reach of over 200,000 city workers and tapping into the attention of a passer by in a world saturated by in your face content, designing the screens to captivate or at least be recognised by a consumer was not an easy task. 

We run the risk of activating an ignore switch in the human brain if we consider our propositions too aggressive or too blatant

We have strong beliefs in purity of design, having experienced in design that less is a more effective tool in capturing some attention. It is well recognised that the average human will ignore the plethora of forced adverts that can bombard your everyday commuter. The ECN screens have a unique position in that they are perfectly positioned to take advantage of downtime; they are placed by elevators, reception areas and other places where people can be found stood waiting. So as a result, our screen designs were thought with dignity in mind. We already have their attention by the very nature of their position. 

Screen design
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Direct from the school of Metro design (the screens were actually inspired by the Microsoft Vision of the Future project), the information screens were pure of clutter and were designed to deliver information as quickly as possible, given that despite the 'captive' nature of its audience, their time was absolutely limited - either walking past to an escalator, or jumping into a lift. 

“Standardising the designs meant that passersby could glimpse quickly at screens, absorbing relevant information without having to read the entire dialogue.”

The purity of these designs essentially then paved the way for the reworking of the website, which needed an equally dynamic representation.

The Client
The Client

ECNlive is a digital communication business providing major office buildings with ‘real-time’ information, connecting executives to relevant content.

For demoMedia it was a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate our expertise within a very exciting, novel user interface design.

The website

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With the point of sale designs complete, the brand had been rolled out as part of a new identity campaign and with the strong visual imagery and iconography in place, the website was ready for renovation also. 

Uniquely, ECN targets marketing to three entirely different parties; the building landlords, the advertisers and also the visitors. Creating a clear content hierarchy was important in order to assume levels of priority to each marketing demographic.

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Included with this is a database of categorised advertiser index, together with media shots of the advertising campaigns all shot on location giving the site and brand a quality feel.

Responsive

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The benefits of responsive design have been widely known since Responsive Web Design was first coined in 2011. The idea is based around using a set of rules based around media queries, which adapt your websites content around the device that is loading it.

The primary reason is a fluid User Experience across different devices, such as Desktop, Tablet or Mobile. There are also cost benefits when considering the website can be delivered to any device, from the same Content Management System.

With a significant volume of users visiting the site on mobile (obvious really, given the displays are marketing directly to people on the move!), responsive was a crucial part of the delivery and the UI framework we designed from the ground up offers a suitable display for all different device size. 

Multi language support

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One of the prime requirements of ECN was to ensure that the site served appropriate content, automatically, dependant on any traffic that may have originated from either the UK or France. 

Not only was the language different, but also so was the content and layout with a different marketing focus accordingly.

In addition to this, there is a live feed that is provided through a restricted API which pull in real time data straight from the screens on the street, onto the website.