IxD and Interface Design of Widgets/Apps

 at Opera Software India - Chandigarh

For the launch of Opera 10.5, Opera was keen on designing their widgets more like applications. Having achieved the technical capability of porting widgets independtly( installing/uninstalling) and the accesibility to file I/O of the base Operating system, the scope for design had widened. Hence the business goal of showcasing these features to the users was clear. This brought focus to the following widgets:

Unite Music Player:
The Unite Music Widget foccused on connecting opera's earlier innovation of Opera Unite. The widget mainly allows to listen to streaming music from other users shared folders. The clear focus hence was the synergy of People and Shared Music.

eBook Reader widget:
This widget caught upon the growing trend of ebooks across the world. The goal of the widget was to provide a single application that allows, browsing, downloading, managing and reading thousands of freely available online books.

Process

As a part of agile development environment, the process required me to switch between projects intermittently. Starting with comparative research and usage trends across the world, followed by recognizing target audience a platform of understanding was created. The feature listing was then done based on which the taskflows and wireframes were iterated upon. These wireframes were then iterated with developers based on their feasability.
Specific contributions apart from wireframing, were:

• Designing the Out of the Box Experience
• Composing Error strings
• Copywriting UI Strings
• Graphical schematics as input to the Graphics designer
• String verification
• Release verification
• Feedback implementation
• System level synthesis

Product

The final release of the developed widgets was done in March 2010, along with the release of Opera 10.5. Appreciated with positive reviews worldwide, the widgets added to the glory of the browser release. A whopping 10K+ downloads within the first week itself clearly displayed the appreciation. These widgets are currently live at widgets.opera.com