Usability Question: Widget or App

Lately, I have been wondering about the pros and cons for widgets and watch apps.

I have a widget - Chuck Norris DB - which basically shows a Chuck Norris joke when selected. The thing is that you might want to scroll up and down in the joke, but as a widget that is not possible and the keys (and the corresponding gestures for Vivoactive) are filtered out by the base platform to select the previous or next page in the widget carousel. (You can get around this by pushing an extra view on top of the widget view, but that is not playing nice with the platform :p - and can confuse the poor users)

The primary advances of widgets over watch apps, is that they are more accessible on the watch. Just a few up or down arrows and it is activated, whereas you have to start a special Connect IQ activity to get to the watch apps. It might not be terrible
many more key presses, but mentally there are a big difference...

The question then is whether you would have

Used an App, so you can get the up/down arrow behaviour
Used a Widget, to get in the carousel.

jim_m_58 over 10 years ago

Depending on where you get your data, a widget on the vivoactive could be an issue, due to the 10 second revert timer. If it takes 8 seconds to get the data (makeJsonRequest()?), it may be hard to do much before the widget returns to the watchface.

tonny.madsen over 10 years ago

Depending on where you get your data, a widget on the vivoactive could be an issue, due to the 10 second revert timer. If it takes 8 seconds to get the data (makeJsonRequest()?), it may be hard to do much before the widget returns to the watchface.

Point taken.

In this case, the icndb.org site is pretty fast. The other similar apps I work on right now have a slightly longer response...

jim_m_58 over 10 years ago

It's not only the speed of the site (in a simulator I can get data in under a second). It's getting to that site from a real device CIQ->BT->phone->inet, and back. What runs in the simulator in under a second, often takes 8 or more from the VA - using the same wifi network. I even tried a test where I was hitting a server in the same room as my vivoactive, (no inet involved - just local network), and it still took a long time.

travis.vitek over 10 years ago

You can get around this by pushing an extra view on top of the widget view, but that is not playing nice with the platform :p - and can confuse the poor users

The Connect IQ User Experience Guide describes this behavior as normal. If users are confused by it initially, they'll get over it after a few widgets behave this way.

I think the deciding factor for me is how I expect the user to use the app/widget. If I can present something that is useful without a button press and without delay (half a second or so), then I lean toward widget.

In the case of your Chuck Norris app, that one seems to be a widget to me. It can easily display something useful without taking a lot of time. I think I'd display cached data initially and then fetch new data upon a key press or via a menu action. A press of the enter key would initiate a new request, and the initial cached quote would be Press Enter or Tap Screen depending on the device. I might even consider having a page loop that showed a history of previous quotes. I'm not sure if this would be available by pressing enter again, or from the menu.

But basically I decide based on what I can display in a reasonable amount of time and how digestible that information is.

tonny.madsen over 10 years ago

The Connect IQ User Experience Guide describes this behavior as normal. If users are confused by it initially, they'll get over it after a few widgets behave this way.

I think the deciding factor for me is how I expect the user to use the app/widget. If I can present something that is useful without a button press and without delay (half a second or so), then I lean toward widget.

In the case of your Chuck Norris app, that one seems to be a widget to me. It can easily display something useful without taking a lot of time. I think I'd display cached data initially and then fetch new data upon a key press or via a menu action. A press of the enter key would initiate a new request, and the initial cached quote would be Press Enter or Tap Screen depending on the device. I might even consider having a page loop that showed a history of previous quotes. I'm not sure if this would be available by pressing enter again, or from the menu.

But basically I decide based on what I can display in a reasonable amount of time and how digestible that information is.

Thanks. Some very good ideas!

For the next similar app, the cache will not work as there are many possible sources, but that is ok.
I want to implement a favourite sort of thing, but that will take some work as well.

The site I used for the requests are all pretty fast and the amount of data not too big, so I'm ok for the time being. This might change in a later app, so I will keep the cache in mind for that...

Again, Thanks!

/Tonny