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5 Reasons Why Housing Developers Need Interactive Touchscreen Experiences

Are you considering a touchscreen experience as a more engaging way of connecting with potential buyers and the local community?

Interactive touchscreens can be a wonderful way to attract attention, create desire and bring your development to life by giving people access to all the aspirational assets such as videos, pictures, floorplans and 3D models of your development to create an immersive experience.

As interactive experiences specialists, we’ve seen first-hand how much of a difference a well-designed touchscreen experience can bring to a marketing suite by giving visitors the chance to immerse themselves in your vision of the future home.

Yet, not everyone’s aware of the significant advantages of touchscreens so that’s why we wanted to highlight some of the biggest reasons why you should invest in a touchscreen experience.

1. Change the way people immerse themselves in your homes

No more relying on printed brochures, boards and models, in fact, there are two ways you can improve how the public accesses information about your development, so people feel more informed about what’s happening and what to expect in the coming months from your development.

POP created an immersive and enticing touchscreen experience to help Laurus Homes’ potential buyers choose their dream home.

Increased accessibility:

Touchscreens are very tactile and easy to use, they appeal to the explorer in us. Just a couple of taps or swipes is all it takes to get to the information you want – literally at your fingertips! Plus, a well-designed touchscreen experience ensures that all age groups and people with different skill levels can interact with your experience and find what they want.

Not to mention, the very nature of touch tends to attract a crowd and help generate more interest for your project.

image to promote a download of our touchscreen guide

Unattended access:

Another huge plus point about touchscreens is that they don’t need someone to be there to supervise usage. If you have an unmanned or busy marketing suite, an interactive touchscreen experience ensures there’s always a wealth of content for visitors to explore – in their own time.

As part of its community consultation programme, Ebbsfleet’s Development Corporation approached POP to build a marketing suite complete with a showpiece interactive touchscreen experience.

2. Create an interactive and engaging environment

It’s all very well providing greater access to your content with a touchscreen, but it’s about so much more than just putting your printed content or website onto a screen. You can use a touchscreen to create something truly tactile, engaging and interactive that will create desire and help people to visualise their new home to create excitement.

Some ideas for what you can include are:

Interactive maps

Where there’s a development there are always going to be maps! Confusing maps, full of detail that can be difficult for people to interpret. With an interactive touchscreen you can create simpler more engaging and informative maps that let people touch on areas to bring up more information as in the image below.

This means you can keep maps clean and simple but people can bring up more detail if they want to, such as pictures, copy, PDFs or videos.

The maps can also be layered so people can switch content on or off. For instance, with Ebbsfleet Garden City people could switch on a green spaces layer so all the parks and playgrounds are highlighted or switch on local transport and then bus routes, train stations and main roads are highlighted.

Visual storytelling

When it comes to new developments, it’s really about selling an aspirational vision to buyers, local residents and businesses. A touchscreen experience provides a fantastic and visual way to showcase exactly what you’re setting out to achieve, in a visual, memorable way.

One of the best ways to demonstrate this is through visual storytelling, to create an engaging experience and really get people’s imaginations running wild with your engaging and bright picture of how the future development will look once finished.

Rich content

As a developer, you have probably already invested heavily in rich content. What do we mean by rich content? – 3D fly-through videos, 360 videos, hyper-real architectural visualisations, drone footage and so much more. All of these assets can easily be included in a touchscreen experience to leave a lasting impression.

Everything else!

With larger developments, there’s often so much content to think about. If you have a wide array of content such as masterplans, floorplans, imagery, concepts, architectural drawings, community info, transport, sustainability documents etc. then a well-organised touchscreen is perfect for storing and displaying that content in a considered and engaging way.

This means that you’re not overwhelming visitors with content, but you’re also ensuring it’s available to them should they want to explore it. And there’s no limitation on the amount of content you can include – as long as it’s available in a structured, sensible way.

It’s different from a website, where content needs to be available quickly. Instead, a touchscreen enables you to build a very clear narrative story for the public to follow – whilst exploring the areas they’re most interested in.

image to promote a download of our touchscreen guide

3. Help ease community fears

We all know that development projects require a lot of liaison and communication with the surrounding community. Land is acquired, new roads are built and neighbours which were previously settled are now undergoing change.

And with that change, comes uncertainty, concerns or even fears.

Providing an interactive touchscreen experience can go a long way to help reassure the public by providing them with transparency and all the right information about what’s happening in their area. You can create an engaging story, and provide them with all the facts and information they need to feel at ease.

We find this is a good way to break down barriers whilst easing the worries or fears some people might have about what the new changes in their neighbourhood will bring.

4. Adapt your content over time

Development projects are usually quite lengthy, potentially lasting many years. In that time, marketing suites will have a lot of traffic, and over time print boards, brochures and models get damaged and become less relevant as time goes on and the development progresses.

Now, let’s compare this to an interactive touchscreen. It’s hard-wearing, built for public spaces, and can easily be updated with new content via a content management system; reflecting the changes and updates in your development as it progresses.

A touchscreen experience can be designed to make it easy to add, update or remove content – without having to call in professional help every time (find out how via our recent blog on the subject: How to Update an Interactive Touchscreen from Anywhere in the World). And once it’s built, it’s also easy and cost-effective to add new sections and features.

5. Try added functionality and features

Does the idea of an interactive touchscreen experience sound impressive so far? Well, there are so many other things you can do with one.

For example, a touchscreen experience doesn’t just have to reside on a screen. Perhaps you could introduce a physical model or masterplan in the room to interact with your touchscreen, with areas lighting up on the model when a certain button is tapped on the screen.

Your visitors might want to send themselves information via email, or a QR code, so they can look at it later. This could include content such as maps, documents, PDFs and videos, and is relatively easy to set up. And to monitor which content people are engaging with most, you can set up analytics – which is invaluable when looking at updating future information.

You can even integrate your touchscreen with an existing database or an API for the latest news, information or database on housing, to add an extra dimension to your experience.

Giving touchscreen experiences a good home

Hopefully, this blog has helped shed a bit more light on why interactive touchscreens are so effective for new developments. Not only do they offer a much more engaging experience whilst providing all the right information to the surrounding community, they’re also a great way to showcase a wealth of content that can be updated as things progress.

Of course, there are so many options when creating a touchscreen experience, so it can feel a bit overwhelming when you don’t know where to begin. That’s why it’s probably best to seek out 2 – 3 different touchscreen specialists and see what they can offer you – they should also be happy to show you previous examples of their work on similar projects.

If you’d like to learn more about what’s possible with an interactive touchscreen experience for your a new development, get in touch with us on +44 (0)117 329 1712 or hello@popcomms.com. We’re always happy to answer any questions or talk you through your options. We’d love to hear from you!

image to promote a download of our touchscreen guide
 
If you’ve got an idea and want to chat it through then just get in touch. Or give us a call 🤙 on 0117 329 1712.
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