Create Interactive Menus

Create interactive menus for displaying your content separately and only when requested by the viewer through the click of a button. Divide long texts into smaller chunks and let your audience explore the content as they want, when they want, and in the order they prefer.

For this tutorial, we will build the following Campaign:

Tip: When creating your Campaign, make a paper sketch before even opening your OnSign account. Plan in advance:

How your content will be divided. Define your Campaign's goal and split your content into different sections accordingly. Try designing different navigation maps and decide which one you think would work better.
How many buttons you will need. Each page requires a button or another action to trigger the next content on screen. Think about their design, where they will be placed on the screen and if it is clear it can be clicked!
How your layout will look. Give structural unity to your Campaign, even though there may be several different pages. Use colors, fonts, and layouts to make different pages look coherent. Read more about design in this OnSign blog post.

When you are ready with your Campaign sketch, prepare your content. You can create all the text elements as image files or you can directly write them in a Composition, which is what we will do. This has the advantage that you can easily change your wording directly on the platform.

Create all Compositions. Start with just the menu layout. Then duplicate the Composition to add the text slides. This way you can keep the layout cohesive. The logo will always be at the same place and so will be the sidebar menu.
When you have all your text elements ready, create a Campaign with one timeline. In this timeline, you place the Composition with just the sidebar menu. Save the Campaign.
With your Campaign with the initial Composition created, continue to the Triggers and Interactivity menu of the Campaign. Click the Add Trigger button on the top-right.
This is what the trigger configuration looks like. The first trigger will get the name button 1.
It is going to be an interaction by touch on a screen region.
A pop-up window will let you select a Custom Region. Since the Composition is mirrored into this touch region editor, you can exactly match the location of your text elements.
For Action, select to Play the Composition with your first text page. It will replace the Composition which is initially in the timeline.
Define for how long the Composition should play before returning to the initial Composition. The default is 10 seconds. This is probably a bit short. The ideal duration depends on your audience and on the length of the text to read.
Please also note the “Propagate to other triggers” switch at the bottom. Depending on your use case, it may make sense to turn this on, but we keep it off for now.
Save the trigger by clicking on the check mark to the right.
Let's create the next trigger. We save us a lot of work by duplicating the trigger because then all we need to change is the name, the touch region, and the destination.
When you mark the trigger a blue “Actions” button replaces the orange “Add Trigger” button. In the drop down menu there is the option “Duplicate trigger”.
When the trigger is duplicated, click on the pencil icon on the right. Change the name of the trigger to button 2.
The biggest time save is on the touch region. All we need to change is the Y coordinate to get a touch region of the same size just overlaying a different text field.
Change the Action to the Composition with the second text page. Save the trigger by clicking on the check mark to the right.
Repeat until you have all buttons created.
At last, publish your Campaign.

Now your customers can browse through your content at their own speed.

For player app versions before 10.0.0, you will have to use the legacy interactivity editor.

With this legacy interactivity editor, there are many more incremental steps required to get the same effect. Take this as your hint to update your player to a more recent version.

Download a prepared zip folder of files to recreate the same Campaign yourself.

When you are ready with your Campaign sketch, prepare your content. The legacy interactivity editor can't play a Composition. Therefore, prepare your texts and save them in image formats, such as JPEG, PNG, or even PDF.
Create an image containing all menu buttons (see image below).
Upload all files to your OnSign account.
Create a new Campaign. Create the Custom Layout you have planned. For this tutorial, we planned two zones: a main content area (A) and a menu (B).
Drag the files to the Timeline.
Next, edit your Layout further by creating screen divisions where the buttons on the menu area will be.
Add a completely transparent image to these new areas in your Timeline to be able to save the Campaign. OnSign does not allow you to save a Campaign with empty timelines. The buttons’ texts will be readable beneath the transparent image.
The transparent image must be in PNG format (learn more about transparency).
“Save” the Campaign when you are done.
The view will change to a sidebar menu with the options Edit, Publish, or Triggers and Interactivity. Click on “Triggers and Interactivity” on the sidebar menu.
Click “Add Interaction” on the right of the header to add an action to each button.
This is the moment we give life to your Campaign! Let’s start with Region 3 (titled “What is digital signage?”) and turn it into a clickable area. Every time the user clicks on it, the content in Region 1 will be replaced by the “What is digital signage” PNG file:
Adjust the settings for the remaining areas:
Confirm with “Save”.
Publish the Campaign to a Player if not done already and check out the result!