Experience Planner

Q: What is a “widget”?

A: To understand widgets, we first need to consider the history of the word.

Originally, the word “widget” was used in business classes to describe a non-specific product. For example, business students might play a simulation game in which they were put into teams that sold “widgets”. It was their job to figure out how to differentiate their widget and market it to consumers.

More recently, the word “widget” has been adopted to describe any small application or tool, ranging from a blog badge to a Facebook application. This usage was originated by executives who were shown various small applications and tools and didn’t know how to describe them. So they used a nonsense word.*

The bottom line is that the term widget has been used to describe so many diverse things that it’s not really a useful word any more. If someone starts talking about widgets, or asks you to design one, the first thing you need to do is work with them to figure out what they really want.

*This is not actually true. To the best of my knowledge, the word “widget” was coined by the people who developed Konfabulator (now called Yahoo! Widgets), which was was one of original platforms for hosting small applications on a PC desktop. But I do think the term “widget” has been co-opted by executives and stretched to the point of uselessness.

Q: How do I help someone figure out what kind of widget they want?

A: There are three important attributes to every widget. If you define those three things, then you’ll be well on you’re way.

1. Purpose
2. Audience
3. Platform/Technology

Let’s look at each of those attributes in detail.

Purpose
It’s sometimes hard to know whether you should begin planning a widget by thinking about your audience or by thinking about the purpose of the widget (i.e. the business objective of the widget). My feeling in this case is that you need to decide on the type of activity you want to encourage in users before you go too far down the path of figuring out what your users want. But purpose and audience really go hand in hand, so you need to keep both in mind as you work.

Based on my own observation of widgets, I am proposing 4 high level purposes that a widget may have.

1. Perform a task
2. Provide information
3. Gather information
4. Connect people socially

Note: I will add a page of example widgets that demonstrate each of these purposes in the near future.

Actually, a widget might fulfill several of these purposes at the same time. The key is to ask questions that help determine which ones are relevant.

Example Questions

• Can you do something useful for your audience, like perform some calculations or sound an alarm at an appropriate time?
  Then maybe your widget is meant to perform a task.
• Do you have content that you want to push out at relevant times?
  Consider a widget that provides information.
• Do your users want to provide feedback or give you information?
  Maybe you want to design a widget that gathers information.
• Would your users find it valuable to be connected with other users? Do they have something to say to each other, or do they want to compare themselves against each other?
  Consider a widget to connect them socially.

Audience
Some widgets have only one audience and others have multiple audiences. It’s your job to figure out who the audiences are.

Possible Audiences

• The user who installed the widget
  In most cases, the widget is going to be used by the person who installs it. For example, if I add a widget to my iGoogle page, it’s because I want to see it every time I go to my home page. The widget should be designed solely to meet my needs.
• The friends of the user who installed the widget
  Many bloggers add widgets to the sidebar of their blogs. For example, on this blog I might add a widget that searches the email archives at IxDA. As the blog writer, I already know about IxDA, and I already know how to go there and search the email archives. I would only add it to my blog as a service to my readers. They are the real audience.
• Both the user and her friends
  A lot of Facebook application fit in this category. They provide some value to the user, but they also provide value to the user’s friends who visit her profile page. For example, a Facebook application might be useful to me because it helps me keep track my favorite recipes. But it’s also useful to my friends because they can see the kinds of recipes I like, and recommend more they think I would also like.

Once you have identified your audience(s), then you can start designing an appropriate UI. If your audience includes both the user and that user’s friends, then you want to enable both audiences to do the things they want to do, without making the interface confusing for either audience.

Platform/Technology
Platform is the third and final attribute for a reason. It should flow naturally from the first two attributes.

For example, let’s say you chose to design the following kind of widget…
Purpose: Perform a function
Audience: Only the user who installs the widget

In that case, you probably want to choose a platform like iGoogle or the PC desktop.

However, if the chose to design a widget more like this…
Purpose: Connect people socially
Audience: The user and her friends

In that case, your widget probably belongs on a platform like Facebook.

Since there are so many platforms, and their pros and cons aren’t well known, I’ll provide a brief overview of the most popular options here.

• Yahoo Widgets
  This is a framework that users download and install on their PC. The framework is for both Mac and PC, which is good, but it does require a separate installation process. So I tend to think this platform is only for people who really want widgets — not for average users.
• Google Gadgets
  Google Gadgets are a lot like Yahoo Widgets, except they can work in more places. A Google Gadget can be placed on a user’s iGoogle page, it can be installed as a PC desktop widget using Google Desktop (which is just as distracting as installing Yahoo Widgets). And I understand a Google Gadget can even be installed on any regular web page.
• Facebook
  Facebook is probably the most popular social network for widgets (Facebook calls them “applications”). Since so many people are already using Facebook, it’s almost ideal for any widget that needs to be social. The downside is that Facebook has been overrun by applications, so the managers are taking steps to minimize the role the applications play. Also, Facebook applications are often written in a proprietary language, making them more difficult to port to other platforms.
• OpenSocial
  Just about every social network that isn’t Facebook uses a Google technology called OpenSocial to power its applications. That includes MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, and dozens of others. Although I haven’t seen many OpenSocial applications yet, it’s a good bet that they’ll become more popular in the future.
• Blog badges
  Most blogs give their owners a place to add “badges”, usually along the left or right hand side of the page. These badges are typically just a snippet of HTML and an image, offering minimal interactivity.
• PC Desktop
  Some PC widgets are actually just specialized applications. A common example is WeatherBug for the PC. It gets installed like any other PC application; it just has a small window and it hides in the Start bar when not in use. Alternately, you could develop a cross-platform desktop widget by compiling a Flash application, or transforming your Flash program into an Adobe AIR application, or by writing your application in any other platform-agnostic language.
• Mac OS X Dashboard
  The Mac operating system comes with a tool called Dashboard that overlays a set of widgets whenever the user presses a special key. Dashboard widgets are generally very popular with Mac users, but it does require you to build a widget just for the Mac platform.
• Vista Sidebar
  In Windows Vista, a tool called Sidebar provides a “dock” for widgets on the side of the screen. It’s actually very similar to Yahoo! Widgets, except it’s built into the operating system. However, Vista Sidebar has the same drawback as Dashboard: it only works for a single operating system.
• iPhone
  The Apple iPhone now allows developers to write 3rd party applications for the phone. Because the screen is small, these applications look like widgets, so they’ve been wrapped in under that term too.

This is not a complete list of widget platforms, it’s just the most popular options. All the same, it’s more than enough options. The good news is that many of these platforms use the same basic technologies (HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, etc.), so it’s usually not that hard to rebuild a widget so it works on multiple platforms. Once you’ve picked a platform (or a few platforms) that make sense for your purpose and audience, you need to talk with your developers to figure out which ones you can reasonably support within your budget and schedule.

So what do you think of this framework? So far it has made sense for my projects, but I’d love to hear some other opinions. How are you thinking about the widgets you’re designing?