Using a window screen to bring people into a cafe

A cafe window screen brings people in when it tells someone walking past, in a couple of seconds, what they can get inside right now. That means one big picture of the food or drink, a few words and a price, changing through the day so the morning shows coffee and breakfast and lunchtime shows lunch. The screen itself has to be bright enough to beat daylight and face the pavement.

What a passer-by takes in

The person looking is walking past, probably at an angle to the glass, a few metres away, with something else on their mind. You get a glance. In that glance they can take in one picture and a handful of words, and maybe a price if it's big enough.

So a window slide wants one thing on it: a bacon roll with "Breakfast until 11.30" in the morning, say, and a flat white with a slice of cake in the afternoon. If you've got three offers, give each one its own slide.

Movement helps in a window more than anywhere else in the cafe, because it's what makes someone turn their head. A short loop of coffee being poured or steam coming off a bowl does that. Avoid anything that flashes or flicks between bright colours quickly, though. It's unpleasant to walk past and it makes the place look cheap.

Leave the full menu for the counter. People choose what to eat once they're inside, and a full menu in the window is too small to read from the street anyway.

Match it to the time of day

A window still showing breakfast at three in the afternoon is advertising something you've stopped serving. The Casty demo handles this for Harbour Cafe in Falmouth, which has a screen behind the counter and one in the window. Both sit in a display group, and dayparts switch the pair from the breakfast menu to the lunch menu at 11:30 every day without anyone touching them. The cafe breakfast and lunch tutorial sets it up step by step.

You don't have to show the same thing in the window as on the counter. The counter screen needs the full menu; the window might want a single "come in for this" slide per daypart. Schedule them separately and they can still change over at the same time. There's more on setting up the slots in dayparting.

Choosing and fitting the screen

Brightness matters most. A normal TV is made for a living room, and in a sunny window it can look grey and washed out by mid-morning. Displays made for windows are much brighter (the spec to compare is brightness in nits) and built to run all day. If your window gets direct sun, that's the kind of display to look at. Consumer TV or commercial display goes through the differences, and the devices page lists the players Casty runs on, from a stick behind a TV to displays with the player built in.

Check which way the window faces. Afternoon sun on a south or west facing window brings glare and heat onto the screen, and a blind or awning that shades the glass helps both.

Portrait often suits a cafe window. A tall screen fills the height of the glass and reads like a poster, which is the shape people are used to seeing in a shop window. If you go portrait, design the window layouts at a portrait size (1080 x 1920) so they fill the screen, and tell us when we set the player up.

Mount it close to the glass, at a height people walking past will see without looking up. Keep an eye on reflections from across the street, and tidy the back of the screen, because that's the side your customers see from inside.

Check it from inside

You can't see your own window screen from behind the counter, so if it goes wrong, nobody inside notices. In the Casty CMS, the Displays page shows a thumbnail of what each screen is showing. Click it to see it full size, or request a fresh screenshot. Make it a habit to glance at it, or walk out the front once a day and look. Checking on your screens covers what each column on the Displays page tells you.

Window screens across several cafes

If you run more than one cafe, tag each window screen "window" and use a dynamic display group. Any screen with that tag joins the group by itself, including ones you add later, and one scheduled event puts the same promotion in every window at once. The Casty demo has a group like this, called Window screens, that picks up the window screens across all its venues.

After closing

A window screen left on overnight can tell people walking past when you open in the morning and what you serve, which is handy on a busy street with evening footfall. On a quiet street it mostly uses power. Supported displays can be switched off on a schedule; saving energy with screen operating hours explains how that works.

If you do leave it on, make sure what's showing makes sense when you're shut. Every screen has a default layout that plays whenever nothing else is scheduled, and something simple with your name and opening times does that job well.