How to make a bar more interactive without redesigning it

Quiz nights need a host. Photo walls need staff. Here are eight ways to make a room more interactive that survive a normal Tuesday with one person behind the bar.

The test any idea has to pass

Every list of ideas for making a bar more interactive is full of things that work beautifully once. A quiz night is great - it needs a host, questions, a microphone and someone counting scores. A photo wall is charming for a fortnight. A cocktail-making class needs a member of staff who is not behind the bar.

So the test is simple: does it still happen on an ordinary Tuesday, with one person working, nobody on a microphone and no event in the calendar? The eight below all pass, because the room does the work rather than the staff.

1. Give the screen a job

The TV is the biggest, brightest thing you own and it is almost certainly showing a match nobody chose. That is a dead surface at the exact moment you want people looking up.

Point it at the room instead: the room's own chat, its photos, its polls, its games. The cost is a streaming stick, or nothing at all if you have a spare phone to mirror to the TV. This one change is the foundation for most of the rest.

2. Ask the room a question

A poll on the big screen is the cheapest interaction that exists. One tap to answer, no losers, no explaining. And it is the fastest way to tell a room the screen is listening.

Ask things whose answers actually change something - the next track, which special stays on the board, what runs next month. A poll with consequences gets several times the response of an opinion question. How to run one is here.

3. Put the room's photos on the wall

Photos guests take in your venue mostly disappear into their own camera rolls. A gallery running on the screen turns them into decor that changes nightly and costs you nothing to produce. It also quietly encourages the behaviour you want: people photograph a place that displays photographs.

4. Let two strangers compete in front of everyone

Nothing pulls a room together like a contest with an audience. A head-to-head game on the big screen - poker, trivia, air hockey, a quick-draw duel - gives two people who have never met a reason to talk, and gives everyone else something to watch and take sides on.

The critical detail is that guests play from their own phones. Anything you have to hand out gets lost, and anything bolted to a table gets ignored. More on what actually gets played.

5. Make your regulars visible

Bars run on regulars, and most bars do nothing to mark them out. When someone who has been in fifty times is indistinguishable from a first-timer, you lose the single easiest piece of social glue you have.

Billbo lets you make it explicit: turn on the approval queue and newcomers wait before they can post, while regulars post instantly - and you can promote or revoke anyone at any time. It doubles as your moderation (see idea 8) and as a status people quietly want.

6. Make arriving feel like something

The moment a person walks in is the highest-attention moment they will have all evening, and almost every venue wastes it. Acknowledge it on the screen. When someone scans in and their name appears in the room, they have been welcomed by the place rather than ignored by it - and they are far more likely to join in with anything that happens later.

7. Use the screen when nothing is happening

Interactivity is not a permanent state. Most of an evening is quiet, and a screen that demands attention during the quiet parts becomes noise you learn to tune out.

Give it an ambient mode - photos drifting, a clock, your name and a line of scrolling text - and let it come forward when there is something to say. You should be able to set how much of the evening runs quiet, because a busy Saturday and a slow Monday want very different answers.

8. Decide the rules before you need them

The reason most venues never put a live chat on a public screen is the obvious one: sooner or later someone posts something you did not want six feet tall behind the bar.

This is a solved problem, but the controls are settings rather than defaults - so it is only solved if you turn them on before you open the screen up. Switch on approval for newcomers, which is enforced on the server rather than only in the app and so cannot be bypassed by a modified client; keep instant posting for people you trust; know that you can revoke anyone mid-evening; and block screenshots of the room if you want to. Ten minutes of settings turns a public screen from a gamble into a manageable thing.

The order to do them in

Do not launch all eight. Put the screen to work, run one poll a night for a week, and see who bites. The photos and the games follow naturally from a room that has already learned the screen belongs to them; started the other way round, they land in silence.

The setup behind all of this is two apps - Billbo on phones and BillboTV on the screen - paired once with a QR code. Both are free to install, and a new saloon includes a monthly allowance of messages, photos, games and polls before anything is payable.