An Arreya designer shares ideas on how you can use the Countdown Widget in digital signage. She elaborates using this widget for Birthdays, Events, and Holidays as a way to add dynamic content that changes and updates your screen as each minute, hour or day passes.
Hello my name is Nicole. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had a passion for creating. I graduated college at the University of Nebraska-Omaha with a bachelor’s degree in Studio Art and a concentration in Graphic Design. As a Designer at Arreya I look forward to any opportunity to help you design the best digital signage experience.
Using Widgets to Elevate the Digital Signage Experience
Arreya widgets can be easily added into your digital signage presentations and provide that dynamic content that keeps changing or updating. They add an extra element to the page and help bring attention to your slides. A few of my favorite widgets are: QR Code, Slideshow, Countdown, and the Website widget. If I had to pick, the countdown widget would be one of my top three favorites. There are so many different ways you can integrate it into your signage. In a marketing sense you can use the countdown widget to highlight your product by setting a countdown for when a special offer may end or start. It encourages your audience to act on what your offer may be.
Ideas for Using Countdown and Count-up
Things you can COUNTDOWN too are birthdays, holidays, upcoming events, a wedding, or even when a promotion may end. This is a great way of building up the viewers anticipation of that meaningful or important day! It’s not only a countdown app you can also COUNT-UP! Giving you more ways to use this same widget. Now you can track how long your company has been in business, how many accident free days a department is at, or how long an employee has been working.
1. Recognizing an Individual’s Birthday
For instance if someone’s birthday is coming up you can display the countdown of how many years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and even seconds they have been living. What a thoughtful way to recognize an individual and a neat way to add motion to your signage as well! Adding information or data to your digital signage that is difficult to share anywhere else. Email is not a good way to share employee information. There is no guarantee the right people will get it or read it. Using digital signage for internal employee communications can engage and retain your employees. Because you can pinpoint the information to specific screens, you can be confident the right information is being seen by the correct audience.
By adding countdowns for birthdays and other personal, fun data to your digital signage, employees are more likely to view the information.
2. Create Anticipation Using Countdown to an Event
Another example, let’s say you are a sporting facility and you have a big event or game or match or meet coming up. You could use the countdown widget to build anticipation to your viewers/guest and with Arreya you could even add our YouTube widget and display that LIVE event/game/match/meet etc. to your viewers (not to mention that they could view this from anywhere through the Arreya progressive web app). Learn more from our YouTube tutorials about inserting the countdown widget here and adding a youtube live widget here.
To use countdown in digital signage think of any event and you can livestream. Celebrate weddings or concerts with people who can’t attend. It’s easy for viewers to enjoy your events. No special downloads or access codes, just share. For an easy way to allow viewers to access the livestream, just add a QR code they can scan with their phone or tablet.
Schools can use countdown for events in their digital signage. So many events can be shared that normally would be difficult for parents and grandparents to attend. COVID has limited access to school events, but through Arreya digital signage you can still share important events.
3. Bring Excitement to the Holidays
We see the countdown widget used the most during the holiday season especially around November and December. People are often hosting holiday parties or events. There are many other holidays throughout the year to add to your digital signage. Getting your viewers to look at your information is the key to successful digital signage content.
Now you may be stumped on how to design a countdown/count-up presentation. NO WORRIES, we have you covered! Arreya makes it easy by offering free templates for you to integrate into your digital signage. You can add one of our already made countdown templates to your presentation! Arreya 
provides a portrait and landscape orientation for whatever template best fits your screens. You can even customize with your information. Make it personal for employees, students or whomever your audience is and engage your viewers.
Also, you can add videos, gifs or other feeds to your countdown for dynamic digital signage.
Overall the Countdown Widget Is Perfect To Attract Attention
As you can see, it can be used for any event or special day to recognize or just a fun way to promote things. Really it’s quite simple to integrate and a dynamic touch that updates and will keep your content feeling current and on point.
Thinking about these examples given, I hope you can come up with ways to use countdown in your digital display. In my time of working in the Arreya Digital Signage Suite I have created a number of templates and the countdown widget is still one of my favorites to design around. Remember there’s a lot of thought and reasoning that goes into creating a design and Arreya is the perfect Digital Signage software to help you easily design informational displays.