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Little Springs Design is a mobile product, research, design, and usability testing consultancy. We help wireless operators, associations, manufacturers, and application & website providers with product and UI design, patterns, training, research and strategy.
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could 2008 be the year of the mobile widget? 2009?
Pundits claimed 2007 to be the year of the widget in several places, such as here, here, here, and slightly more recently, here. Newsweek may have started all this talk.
We're not talking about "web widgets" here, not bits of code on a web site that back in the '90s we may have called a portlet. Not GUI elements either. Or Facebook apps. All of these are nice, but a bit less useful in the limited screen real estate and limited user attention environment of the mobile phone. Our definition:Mobile widgets are always-on, internet-connected, auto-updated, light-weight applications that reside within an existing OS framework and appear as miniaturized (i.e. never full-screen) display elements within an existing or enclosing GUI.
This space comes complete with business, technical, and design difficulties. First and foremost, the number of widget platforms adds an extra layer to the device proliferation problem found especially in downloadable applications. This immediately leads to the business difficulty: which platform to choose?
Of course, as a design consultancy, our concerns lie in the fact that many widget solutions are simply not compelling for most users. We thus wrote our mobile widget white paper to understand the business and design environment for mobile widgets.
You'll get:- overview of the state of the mobile widget art
- key design considerations
- a widget design structure
- examples of compelling widgets
- the future of mobile widgets
Sign up to download mobile widget white paper.
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Seems that the website does not work:
- try to register twice to download the report, never get an email…
- try to use the contact form to notify you of this issue, got an aspx error…
Comment by tomsoft — November 29, 2007 @ 4:40 am
We’re very sorry about that. Folks smarter about programming than me are looking into it right now.
We’re getting messages from others, so please try the download link first. If anyone else encounters any problems, either tell us here in comments and (as long as you include an email on your link page) we’ll send you the PDF, or email us directly: newsletter@littlespringsdesign.com with your contact info.
Comment by steven — November 29, 2007 @ 12:45 pm