Customer autonomy
Enabled clients to easily manage and customize signage independently.
Rapid integration
Launched Polotno-powered solution in under a month, accelerating product delivery.
Designer empowerment
Significantly boosted team productivity with an intuitive design builder.
HUMElab provides digital signage cloud solutions tailored for hospitality and retail businesses. Their tools empower retailers and hotel chains like Ibis to display dynamic content – advertisements, menus, and real-time updates – across in-location screens, improving guest experience and keeping brand messaging fresh and consistent.
Key numbers
<1 month
Integration time (ScreenLab)
4 months
Integration time (HumeIPTV)
5
Team size (developers)
50 – 100
Users (internal design team)
10 months
Development time saved vs building from scratch
The challenge
HUMElab’s visual editor was rigid, inefficient, and blocked customer autonomy. Designers were stuck with outdated tools, and hotel staff couldn’t make simple content updates without help – slowing down delivery, draining support resources, and limiting product evolution.
The outcome
Switching to Polotno SDK allowed HUMElab to rapidly (under 1 month) integrate a powerful, intuitive editor into their signage and hotel CMS solutions. They drastically reduced their development timeline (saving ~10 months), simplified workflows for internal designers, and empowered customers to independently manage content.
The challenge
A legacy editor blocking customer autonomy and slowed delivery
HUMElab's previous content editor, developed in early 2010s, had become outdated and extremely difficult to use. Only select internal staff could manage it effectively, causing bottlenecks in content creation and slowing client deployments. Additionally, the complexity prevented end-customers – such as hotel management – from independently updating signage, forcing them to depend entirely on HUMElab's team for even minor changes.
To stay competitive and address client demands for easier, faster, and more intuitive digital signage solutions, HUMElab faced a critical decision: either invest substantial time and resources into building a modern editor from scratch or find a customizable third-party solution that could rapidly integrate into their existing platforms.
The solution
Buy, not build. How Humelab modernized their signage stack without starting from scratch
HUMElab decided to integrate Polotno SDK, primarily attracted by its simplicity, ease of integration, comprehensive documentation, and built-in features that matched their strategic needs. Within one month, they successfully integrated Polotno SDK into Screenlab, their signage management platform. Screenlab allowed customers to easily manage signage schedules, media playback, and interactive content, drastically simplifying content creation processes for hotels and retail businesses.
Following this success, HUMElab implemented Polotno SDK into their suite of products such as IPTV. The solution leverages Polotno’s powerful features, including user-friendly drag-and-drop editing, multilingual support, customizable widgets, and interactive menus. It allowed hotels to fully manage TV screens and digital signage independently, boosting their operational flexibility.
Polotno’s frequent and automatic updates enabled Humelab to continuously introduce new capabilities, such as AI-driven text generation and image editing tools, without significant additional development overhead.
" What's cool about Polotno is that there is an update every week with a new cool feature. And we don't have to focus on that. We can just say, oh yeah, we want that. So we add it, but we don't have to develop it."
Simon Provost
Full stack developer @ HUMElab
The outcome
Modernizing the product, improving UX, and cutting support overhead – all while keeping it lean on the dev side
Ultimately, Polotno SDK provided HUMElab with a powerful, flexible, and efficient tool to modernize their digital signage solutions, significantly enhancing customer experience, internal productivity, and competitive advantage.
✅ Rapid deployment and significant resource savings
By integrating Polotno SDK, HUMElab drastically reduced its development timeline from an estimated 10 months down to less than a month, allowing rapid delivery to clients and freeing up engineering resources for other core product enhancements.
✅ Increased productivity for design teams
The shift from the cumbersome legacy system to Polotno's intuitive editor significantly boosted internal productivity. Designers quickly adopted the new tools, eliminating frustration and dramatically accelerating content creation workflows.
✅ Empowering end customers
Hotel and retail staff found Polotno-powered systems intuitive and easy to adopt. Customers could independently manage and customize signage content without specialized technical knowledge, resulting in higher satisfaction and reduced support dependency.
✅ Continuous innovation and scalability
With Polotno, HUMElab regularly benefits from new functionalities delivered directly via the SDK, allowing them to remain innovative and competitive without incurring substantial additional costs or engineering workloads.
Final word
HUMElab bet on speed, usability, and control – and it paid off.
With Polotno, they didn’t just replace a legacy editor. They unlocked a flexible platform, cut months of development, and gave their customers the power to move faster. For a company building tools across hospitality and retail, that agility is everything.
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