Sumo

Are you ready for widgets?

A desktop ‘widget’ or ‘gadget’ is a downloadable, interactive virtual tool that provides services such as showing the user the latest news, the current weather, a dictionary, a map programme, sticky notes, or even a language translator.

Microsoft call these gadgets, whilst everyone else uses the term widgets (which I’ll use here), but they are both the same thing.

I spotted the first Museum (Rijksmuseum) to use one of these widgets last week. Their Rijkswidget delivers a different work from their collection to your desktop every day. When a user clicks on the painting, it shows information about the work and the artist.

In our office, we wondered if we could create a widget along similar lines and within a couple of days had created one which could display a picture a day. This could be simply pointed at a collections section on a Museum website and it would automatically select a different work each day, or could receive the images from a specially created database.

Coming from a marketing angle, we also wondered how we could add in more sales-driven information, so we developed the programming so that the widget displays exhibition details which it takes from the Museum events section (taking the information from the events page means the whole thing can be automated rather then the marketing team having to update the events on the website and than again for the widget).

How can widgets help you?

Here are two examples of widgets working for commercial organisations:

Babystrology is an American based company which sells t-shirts, mugs and caps with phrases like ‘Pregnant, not fat’ on them. The website had lackluster results until they developed a ‘babyticker’ – a widget which allows you to see your baby’s growth on your desktop simply by entering your due date. The widget which has a link through to the Babystrology website now accounts for over 95 percent of their website traffic.

CarDomain.com is a social networking site for car lovers, where they can share pictures of their cars, swap stories and ask questions about upgrades and repairs. The company recently started accepting uploads of user-created videos. The videos are available on its widget, which scrolls the latest uploads.

Hundreds of outside sites have downloaded the widget, and many users have put it on their CarDomain profiles. Less than two weeks after posting it, CarDomain saw an uptick of 60,000 page views a day.

Conclusion

The Rijkswidget has already been downloaded by tens of thousands of people, many of whom may never have previously heard of the Museum but saw the widget listed as ‘Yahoo Widget of the Day.' This is an innovative but relatively simple tool to set up, it can help you to market your venue and will cost you little time or money.

You don’t have to be stuck with object of the day, fossil of the day, bird of the day etc., you could even have a widget which changed with each key exhibition.

Move over podcasts – widgets are the new techno way-in for Museums (and I am keen to put our prototype to practical use, so if you’re interested in having a widget on your Museum website, get in touch).

Originally printed in Arts Professional magazine, July 2008