Evolution of the Widget
Posted Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at 12:44 pm by Marissa (48 posts)
For the first time in a while (or perhaps ever), my husband asked me for some ideas for a Web site. Excited to offer my professional advice, I started spouting ideas. “And then, to top it all off,” I said with a gleam in my eye, “you can make a widget.”
“A what?” he said?
“You know, “ I said, “A widget.”
But he didn’t know. I had ventured into that underworld of web jargon.
Most of us were introduced to the widget in our fourth grade math class: If one person at a factory can make 30 widgets in an hour, how many widgets can a factory that employs 3 people make in the course of a standard work day.
To those of us in the web business, a widget is a kind of mini-web application that can be easily distributed to any Web site. If you’ve got a petition campaign, and you can give your blog some code so that the campaign appears on their Web site, then you’ve got a widget.
But if our fourth grade widget factory can make 720 widgets in a day, it takes just a little bit longer for web developers to make just one. One mistake common mistake when it comes to widget design and development it to toss the widget aside as I kind of “mini-me” to the Web site, and assume it does not need much more in the way of design or development than the original application. But its tiny size can sometimes be a huge hurdle. Here are some things to consider when making a widget:
- Widgets come in all shapes and sizes. Make sure actions can fit in the space that a widget allows.
- Since your widget is a minified version of your larger web application, make sure you shrink any necessary elements (such as your logo).
- Put tracking in place so you can tell who your best promoters are.
- Widgets aren’t magical – if you want people to use your widget, you have to promote it.
Don’t treat your widget like an afterthought. If you put the time and effort into its layout, design, and functionality, you’ll have increased your reach faster than it takes three employees to make 500 widgets!
August 4th, 2010 at 11:28 am
You mention that the size is sometimes a factor and I thought I’d throw in another example of why this is true. When we test across different browsers there are almost always slight variances in the ways IE, Firefox, and Safari render fonts and sizes of things (even between Mac and PC). For the most part, an item being a few pixels lower on the page in Safari than it is in Firefox is not a problem. But when you are building a widget that is only 200 pixels tall to begin with, those small discrepancies can quickly become the difference between “working” and “not working.” I’m always surprised by how much more back and forth there tends to be when testing the layouts of widgets as opposed to full sites.