COUNTDOWN Widget

hyeju park
5 days ago
3 min read

Company: Samsung Electronics Project: Galaxy S8 Calendar Feature

Role: Main UI Designer Collaborator: 1 GUI Designer

Duration: Jun 2017 – Feb 2018 Platform: Galaxy S8

Background of project and Concept " One year with you", "98 days with our baby"

Have you ever counted the days until a special moment—

such as an anniversary with your partner, a child’s 100th day, or a wedding anniversary?

Observing how users track time around meaningful dates inspired the development of this feature. Many users prefer to see how many days remain until an important event or how long it has been since a specific date.

Through user observation, it became clear that people often prefer quick access through widgets or home screens, rather than opening the calendar app and manually counting the days.

Based on this behaviour, a D-day concept was designed as an add-on plugin for the calendar application. The feature allows users to easily track important dates directly from their device interface.

The final result was implemented as a widget on the Galaxy S8, enabling users to monitor their D-day events directly from the home screen.

A D-day widget that allows users to track

meaningful dates directly from the home screen.

User Research in a Global Context

D-day and Countdown

After extensive discussion between international English-language experts and Korean language reviewers, we adopted function names and notation styles that are appropriate for each linguistic and cultural context.

In Korea, this concept is commonly referred to as “D-Day.” However, in the United States, the term carries a strong military meaning—referring to the start of a combat operation or a decisive battle day. To avoid this unintended connotation, the feature was named “Countdown” in the U.S. version.

Because the concept is understood differently across cultures, the notation system was also localized. In Korea, it is common to attach plus and minus signs directly to dates (e.g., –20 days, +20 days). However, this symbolic notation is unfamiliar to many international users. Therefore, in the U.S. and Canada, the same information is expressed in plain language, such as “20 days left” or “20 days before.”

This localization ensures that both the function name and the way time is displayed align with each region’s linguistic habits and mental models.

Why do people count days instead of simply checking dates?

Nation	Countdown	D-day
America /Canada	Used not only for counting time but also when counting days until a specific date or event.	Originally a military term used to refer to the start date of an operation or the decisive day of a mission.
Korea	More strongly associated with time-based counting, such as the New Year’s Eve countdown event.	Refers to the number of days remaining until a specific date, and is also commonly used to mean the exact day of the event itself.

While countdown is often associated with time-based counting,

D-day is commonly used to track the number of days until a meaningful event.

Age Counting System in Korea

Is the “Korean age system” unique to Korea?

The age-counting system in which a newborn is considered one year old at birth is a concept historically used only in Korea.

When this project was conducted, the Korean age system was still widely used in Korea. Although the system was officially abolished in 2023, it remained part of everyday understanding at the time of the project.

At the beginning of the research, it was assumed that similar systems might also exist in East Asian countries such as China and Japan. However, through conversations with international users, it became clear that these countries follow the international age-counting system, where age begins at zero.

This discovery led to a change in the UX design.To accommodate Korean users’ familiar mental model, an option to “start counting from 1” was introduced in the Korean settings.

Outcome

Widget Integration

User research showed that opening the calendar app simply to check a date

was perceived as a “heavy action.”

To make date tracking more accessible, the feature was implemented as a home-screen widget, allowing users to check important dates at a glance without opening the app.