As digital signage becomes increasingly more common in businesses and cities across the globe, many companies have made the switch from paper to digital. Digital displays have many benefits, so much so that it would take a separate blog post to cover all of them, but the topic we will be discussing in this blog is the benefits of using an interactive display vs non-interactive. To explain the difference simply, interactive displays allow users to control the content of the screen by touch while non-interactive displays do not respond to touch. Should you make your digital sign interactive? Let’s go over interactive digital signage and the benefits of the touchscreen experience.
Digital Feedback and Analytics
In many cases, businesses use interactive signs to get feedback from customers. How so? Let’s say you own an apparel/shoes company that advertises your products on a digital display, allowing customers to touch any product they want to see details about. After a month’s time, you notice that 80% of interactions on the display are for apparel and only 20% of interactions are for shoes. With this information, you would then be able to adjust advertisements based on your target audience which in this case would be for apparel.Another one of the many ways to get customer feedback is by displaying frequently asked questions with answers on your display. You could then track the questions that are interacted with the most and produce solutions to make it more clear to customers in the future.
Companies that utilize digital signage see a 47% increase in brand awareness (LEARN MORE) and can pinpoint messaging to better engage customers and employees. Digital signage also gives you the freedom to instantly change or highlight important information across multiple locations or offices. With the special progressive web app (PWA) feature, information can also be viewed on remote devices.
Ease of Use
With the COVID pandemic changing the way the world operates as we know it, reducing person to person contact and the spread of germs has become crucial to returning to a pre-2020 world. With interactive displays, you are able to use any mobile device to interact with the same content as your businesses display. The most common example of this is restaurants using mobile devices to share their menus. To use my previous example of an apparel/shoe store, let’s say the capacity for customers is 20 due to the pandemic. While customers wait in line to enter, they would be able to browse via their mobile device.
Not only does mobile use help with the spread of germs, but it can also provide a better experience for customers and employees. Having a catalog/menu in your pocket means you can order and shop from anywhere. Along with that, employees’ jobs are made a lot easier as some questions may already be answered through the digital signage on customers’ phones.
Ways to Use Interactive Digital Displays
After going over just a few of the benefits of touchscreen experience through interactive digital signage, let’s get into some real world use cases that are being implemented today. One word that may often come up in your search for digital signage is wayfinding. Wayfinding is the process of determining directions to a location based on your current location. Think of it like gps on your phone. You may have seen things like this in a mall where they display a map of the mall and your location. With digital signage it makes it easier to select a certain location you want to get to and displays the directions to get there.
Donor recognition displays are another popular use case for digital signage. Many organizations use donor recognition displays to celebrate donors and encourage more donations. Updates to traditional donor walls can be expensive, but interactive digital donor walls reduce the cost of updates. Digital donor walls are easy to update with instant deployment and Google integrations from Sheets. With an interactive display it gives users the ability to search through the list of donors, and also apply to donate themselves. (LEARN MORE)
Schools around the world have also started to implement interactive signage. Students can view the lunch menu, sign into class, view sporting events and much more. Some schools have even started implementing face recognition to count the number of students coming in and out of classrooms to keep track of attendance.
Digital history walls have also become a popular way to use interactive content. The timelines can contain spotlighted information, videos can be activated with a touch and new content can be added easily.
The biggest take away is that interactive digital signs have a use case for almost any business. Adding the functionality of being able to interact with the signage adds to the experience and leads to better feedback in general. Interactive digital signage brings users the dynamic benefits of the touchscreen experience.
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.
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