Digital signage
in Dublin

Under a deadline people do not compare, they eliminate. The screen's job in that stretch is to remove uncertainty fast, not to persuade:

• How long it takes, before what it costs. Somebody with a meeting at two decides on time. «Ready in five minutes» outperforms any price on the board during that hour.
• Whether there is a queue and how long. The thing that makes people walk on is not the price, it is not knowing whether they will still be standing there at ten to.
• The whole offer at once, not rotating. This is the one hour where rotation hurts: someone glancing in for two seconds needs the answer now, not on the next slide.

Outside that window the same screen should do the opposite — rotate, explain, sell the thing that needs a sentence. The two behaviours are incompatible, which is exactly why scheduling matters more here than the content itself.

The measurement that sets it up takes one week: note the ten minutes when the queue is longest. Build the fast version around that and let it run half an hour either side. Everything else can go back to normal.

Three kinds of assumption cause most of the misses:

• Dates without explanation. «Closed Monday» reads as arbitrary if you do not know it is a bank holiday. «Closed Monday — bank holiday» costs four words and removes the confusion.
• Products named locally. Every food trade has items whose name means nothing to someone who did not grow up here. A three-word description beside the name converts far better than the name alone.
• Assumed knowledge of how it works. Whether you queue, whether you order at the counter, whether you need to book. Locals learned it by osmosis; nobody else did.

None of this means writing for tourists. The distinction matters commercially: these are residents. They will come back weekly for years if the first visit goes smoothly, and the first visit is exactly where the unspoken assumptions do their damage.

The same reasoning gives a cheap and unusually reliable test: show your window content to someone who moved here recently and ask what they would want explained. What they name is almost never what a long-time local would have guessed, and it is usually two or three small things that cost nothing to add.

Take one item on your screen and ask whether it assumes something learned by living here for twenty years. If it does, add the four words that explain it — that is the whole change.

Three things worth checking on the policy you already pay for:

• What is excluded near the entrance. Wet floors, trailing cables and anything placed on the footpath are common exclusions or conditions. The doorway is where most claims start and where cover is thinnest.
• Whether the sum insured still matches the business. A figure set when the shop opened rarely gets revisited. Growth quietly makes it too low.
• And what the conditions require of you. Many policies require records — cleaning, checks, signage. Not keeping them is the usual reason a valid claim gets argued.

The part that connects to how the shop is run is small and boring: most of the conditions are about warning people. A visible notice at the right moment is not decoration, it is the evidence that the condition was met — and it is the cheapest thing on the whole list.

There is a second reason to look, unrelated to claims: premiums are quoted on what you declare, and what you declare is often years out of date. Businesses change what they do faster than they change the description of what they do, and it can move the price in either direction.

Take the policy out and read only the exclusions. It is two pages, it takes ten minutes, and it is the only part that matters on the day you need it.