Wednesday, October 1, 2008

AOL Living - Horoscope Widget

Horoscope Widget

This is another widget done by me for AOL Living channel.

User Case:

1. nav between, and read, three horoscopes (one for yesterday, today and tomorrow), updated daily.
2. personalize the widget with user's sign / birthday.
3. visit either the weekday or weekend destination (via large call to action on bottom)
4. sponsorship via loaded SWF in top right
5. syndication via Goowy platform (lower right)
6. other branding (horoscope author, feed provider)

Customization :

The user picks his/her astrological sign from the menu. Once chosen, the data is written to Shared Object so persistent (on that computer).

Also written and read via Goowy's get + setSettings (so it is persistent and visible to third parties on FB).

Before the sign is ever chosen:
"Change sign" button reads "Choose sign"
"Choose sign" button has a white pulse animation, prompting the user to pick their sign.
The horoscope is set to the generic "Daily"

Goowy :

This widget will use the Goowy Platform. When the user clicks the “snag” button in the bottom right of the widget, the Goowy API runs a canned flip animation and shows their syndication panel. Each icon in this panel starts a unique process to embed the TT5 widget in the desired destination (Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, etc). We are using their tool to build a Facebook App for this widget.

We connect to their API inside the Flash and then publish the widget on their servers via the "dashboard" on their site. We then take their embed code for the widget on their site, adapt it to fit our standards and insert the code pointing to their server) into our SWF publisher.

Tracking :

This widget will use both:
Goowy’s full tracking suite (via a Living sub-account on their site)
Omniture (via eVar16 and a client-cap for this widget).

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