Widgets, in terms of concept, are getting quite popular. Not only because of the interest from Yahoo! when they bought Konfabulator more than a year ago, or their embedding in MacOS X and in the next Windows Vista, but now also Adobe with Apollo is “pushing” into that direction. A strength of a widget is that it can stay in the background providing subtle information, or something we should keep in mind, being this content visible every now and then (when we hide or close all the opened applications, for instance).

How does the happiness fit in? Recently, thanks to a couple of lectures I’ve seen on TEDTalks, I started thinking again about what makes us happy - who doesn’t? Basically happiness is a status that can happen in very different contexts and it’s not a result of an entire analysis of what happened so far, but it can be triggered, also if temporary, just by a positive thought. Doing a whole analysis about what happened to us we will always be able to find reasons to be happy and reasons not to be so. The first trick so it’s simply to think about the good things.

During a small research on the topic I found the reasons why people are happy very inspiring. Not only because sometimes you can think “hey, how can be this guy happy only because of that?”, and this can trigger a kind of self-consciousness that we should be happy also with smaller things. But what could be very helpful is to get some suggestions from there. For instance, if a person is happy because he helped a friend in troubles, if we are not happy, why don’t we try to help a friend? Happiness doesn’t always fall from the sky, sometimes you have to earn it.

So after these technological and social inputs I ended up developing a Yahoo! Widget (formerly Konfabulator), the Widget of Happiness.

As you can read I use the term “lucky” instead of “happy”, this is because the user maybe is not yet happy, but it should be after having remember the reasons. Probably the right terminology should be “I should be happy because…” but it gets too much explicit and pretentious in my opinion.

It has basically three simple functions:

to write down the reasons you should be happy, and so to keep you aware of them, leaving you different options of intrusiveness (provided by the Yahoo! Widget Engine);

to see why other people is, or more precisely should be, happy;

to share, or not, your reasons.

There are some preferences you can set:

if to share the reasons with others and so make them public;

which color to use for the lists’ background;

the frequency the others’ list will be updated.

To avoid as much as possible any misunderstanding about its usage, I put some instructions that can be accessed using the right-click button menu.

Since a common aim for artists is to make people happy, if this simple widget will success on that, am I risking someone will start defining me like that?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 9:09 pm and is filed under work, platform, interaction-design, widget. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.