Interactive Touchscreen Design & Development: A Complete Guide to Engaging Experiences

There has been an explosion in interactive digital content and technologies in recent years and for good reason!

Customers now expect to be able to interact easily with brands, accessing information in simple, intuitive and engaging ways. According to Demand Gen Report, 93% of marketers find interactive content highly effective for educating prospective customers. 

Interactive touchscreen displays are the perfect medium for housing your interactive content. They’re ideal for a wide range of settings, from mobile to large displays in showrooms, innovation centers, trade counters, and exhibitions – and are perfect for all sectors, from housing development, engineering, advanced manufacturing, and corporate communications to retail, museums, and education.

Want to find out more? This ultimate guide covers all the information you need about interactive touchscreen design and development, including their features and benefits, how to get started and some of the best examples.

Let’s start with the benefits 

Whether you have a new product or service to showcase, a diverse portfolio to present or complex information to convey, interactive touchscreen experiences will help you get your message across and engage with your customers in a more personalized, creative and immersive way.

Here are some of the benefits:

• A visual, fun way to keep customers engaged, with various interaction options.
• Showcases complex information simply and intuitively, making it quick and easy for customers to find what they need.
• Allows customers to peruse content based on their interests, wants and needs.
• Tells a story in a more creative and compelling way, leaving a lasting impression.
• Updates can be made instantly to content, unlike printed materials, keeping things fresh.
• Adds a WOW factor, positioning brands as innovative and forward-thinking.
• Lets sales teams customize content on the fly to meet customer needs.
• Provides valuable analytics to refine content and the user journey based on customer interests.

Still not convinced? For more upsides, read this resource on the benefits of an interactive brand experience and how to use touchscreen interactives for maximum impact.

What’s possible with interactive touchscreens? 

Not all touchscreen experiences are created equal and their capabilities have grown significantly with advancing technology.

For example, experiences can be built with a web-based content management system, allowing you to control content and messaging remotely. They can also be integrated with back-office systems, such as CRMs, PIMs and DAMs, ensuring that data transfer is smooth, efficient, and always up to date. Advanced analytics can be applied to track the journey of users through your experience, helping you identify what resonates most with them.

Compatibility is another essential feature, with software that can run on a wide range of devices – from mobile phones to large touchscreens – across various operating systems, including iOS, Windows and Android. Many systems also offer self-serve content options, enabling visitors to send valuable information from the experience directly to their email. Additionally, user data capture features make it easy to follow up with potential leads based on the details they provide.

For businesses with international reach, multilingual capabilities are often a must. Even in environments with unreliable internet access, offline functionality ensures that the touchscreen continues to perform. Technologies such as facial recognition, object recognition and artificial intelligence further enhance the user experience by adding a layer of personalization and innovation.

Beyond basic interaction, some systems allow the touchscreen to interact with its surroundings, such as controlling lighting, sound or triggering additional screens and projections. You can even run multiple versions of an experience with tailored content and branding for different audiences. Additionally, wayfinding features help guide visitors through buildings, exhibitions or even entire cities and interactive 3D models can be manipulated, magnified and explored in great detail, offering a richer and more engaging experience.

As you can see, the possibilities and endless when it comes to interactive touchscreen experiences. Watch this video for a close look at what you can achieve…

Want to explore the possibilities further? Dig a little deeper in our article on features you can include in a touchscreen, check out our eBook on touchscreen experiences or get the ball rolling by booking a demo with our expert team.

Before you dive in… 

Before you dive in, here are five things you should know before designing a touchscreen experience:

1. Design with your audience in mind. Think about their pain points and goals, ask yourself – Who are they? How do they like to interact with technology? What will pique their interest? What information are they after?

2. Make it intuitive with visuals. Visuals that resonate and are easy to manipulate with a clear path laid our for users to take. At no point should they be confused or unsure of what to do next.

3. Think about your physical space. How you will make it clear that people are welcome to try your interactive experience? Humans are cautious by nature, which is why we’re big fans of interactive welcome screens that encourage people to step up and have a go.

4. Match your hardware to your experience. A showstopper of an experience suits a large touch-wall or touch-table where it can be easily viewed by a crowd but not the best idea if you’re wanting people to enter personal information where an alcove or smaller tablet is better suited

5. Make it count with analytics. Use them to track the journey that people take and the content they interact with, get a clear understanding of what generates the most action.

Thinking of getting started? Here are seven things you should know before choosing an interactive touchscreen display for your business.

What you need to get started on your interactive touchscreen design and development project

There are two key parts of a touchscreen experience – the hardware and the visual experience.

• Hardware comprises not only the touchscreen, but also the PC that runs the software needed to display the content on the screen.
• The visual experience is the software – the content that your audience will see and interact with. It could include 3D models, videos, animations, PDFs – anything that will help you engage with your visitors.

• However, one of the most important choices you’ll make is your developer. They can help you turn your vision into a reality, listening to your challenges, needs and ideas and giving you guidance on what’s possible – and how.

If you’d like to know more about the process, take a look at this article: What’s the Process When Developing the Best Interactive Touchscreen Display?

Will your touchscreen design work? 

This is one of the most central questions for any client – will your interactive touchscreen experience actually work? The answer often lies in your creative strategy, which is the work you put in to turn a great idea into something that delivers results.

A creative strategy starts with how your experience fits into your brand image and narrative as a whole. You don’t want your experience to be isolated from other marketing efforts.

You can then decide what you want it to achieve. Try to be SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely – with your goals.

From here, you can build a strategy to align goals with customers. What can you offer through your experience that will guide them towards submitting their details, for example or ordering a sample?

This is where fun features, personalization and the physical environment all come into play, as discussed in our guide: Why a Creative Strategy is Important When Developing an Interactive Touchscreen Experience.

Don’t forget micro-interactions 

It’s not just about the structure and the bigger picture. Micro-interactions are smaller details in a touchscreen experience, such as:

• Navigation and menus
• Page and content transitions
• Carousels and animations
• Gamification and interactive tools
• The ability to send content to themselves

These micro-elements draw customers in and keep them engaged by providing subconscious satisfaction. They need obvious triggers and rules, clear feedback and appropriate loops and modes – as covered in our: Guide to Micro-Interactions for Interactive Touchscreen Experiences.

For example, look at this interactive touchscreen experience designed and developed for JSP. From the top level category and sector landscape to the industry standards and product specifications, every micro-interaction is seamless and intuitive…

Keeping touchscreen content up to date 

There are lots of reasons you might want to update your content, such as:

• Expanding your product range
• Updating your experience for future events
• Keeping content fresh for users

Whatever the case, you should decide whether you need an updateable experience early in the development process, as this functionality can be harder to include later on.

With the right approach, you won’t need to keep going back to your developer when you want to update content. In most cases, a web-based content management system (CMS) can be developed, where instant updates can be made.

This is covered in more depth in Can You Keep Content on an Interactive Touchscreen Display Updated?

8 interactive touchscreen design examples 

Looking for more inspiration? We’ve got you covered with real-world examples of interactive touchscreen developments. Click on any of our examples for more information or check out our run-through of 10 more outstanding touchscreen design projects.

How much do interactive touchscreens cost? 

There are a few factors that affect the cost of an interactive touchscreen design and development project:

• Hardware – prices vary for wall-mounted, freestanding and handheld touchscreens. You can pay between £700 to £3,000 per touchscreen, with touch tables setting you back between £6,500 to £12,000.
• Computers – You’ll need a powerful PC to run your experience, which will typically cost between £700 and £1,200.
• Development – You can expect to pay upwards of £5,000 for an agency to build an experience for you or with you. You can save money by investing in software yourself, but it could compromise the end results if you don’t have the necessary in-house skills.
• SaaS – A subscription pricing model has become common practice across the software market, factoring updates, upgrades, and support into your package. Pricing typically ranges from £10 to £30 per user, per month, but some providers will instead use a flat monthly usage charge, creator licence fee, or consumption-based model.

You can get a better idea by reading: How Much Does It Cost to Make a Touchscreen?

How long does a touchscreen design and development project take? 

Every interactive touchscreen design project is different, so there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. As a very general rule of thumb, you can expect it to take between 8 to 12 weeks. However, this depends on whether:

• You have all the content you need
• You need custom-built screens or enclosures
• You have lots of stakeholders involved

To give you a better idea, here’s an outline of the typical development stages we use at POP and how long they take:

• Content review and sitemap – 1-3 days
• Content storyboard and wireframes – Up to a week
• Design – 1-2 weeks
• Touchscreen development – 4-8 weeks
• Final review and delivery – 1-2 weeks

You can delve deeper into these steps in: How Long Does an Interactive Touchscreen for Advanced Manufacturing Take to Develop?

Is it worth it? 

With costs reaching into the thousands, you might be wondering whether an interactive touchscreen experience is worth it.

The answer is yes, with the right strategy. When Wienerberger UK adopted a new interactive experience, it generated a seven-figure profit in year one alone. This was directly taken out of competitors pockets, representing exactly the sort of ROI they wanted.

Will it work for your brand? Firstly, it’s vital to consider your main focus, whether that’s brand awareness, lead capture or financial gain. Will an interactive touchscreen help you achieve your goals or will another solution work better?

Next, think about your specific goal and how you will monitor it. What number of leads would you be happy with, for example? Awareness is harder to measure, as is the benefit to your sales team – but these factors should not be ignored.

Remember to account for the cost of not using a touchscreen – such as printing, transport and logistics.

All this and more is covered in How to Measure the ROI of an Interactive Touchscreen Experience.

Bring your interactive touchscreen to life with POP!

At POP, we design and develop interactive touchscreen experiences that help our customers engage more meaningfully with their customers.

How we achieve this is by knowing everything there is to know about what’s important to your audience – the technology comes to nothing if the content isn’t tailored to their needs.

Our unique Customer Success Blueprint drives our development process. We’ll use it with you to define the vision for your experience, what you want users to experience and do and what results you need as a business.

The answers to these questions and more are key in helping us to define your customer’s journey, the most relevant content and the visual story needed to create a personalized experience. The more personalized an experience, the better – authentic, human content makes for a much more memorable and valuable experience.

To find out more about touchscreen interface design, check out our eBook on touchscreen experiences. Or get the ball rolling by booking a demo with our friendly team.