Custom widgets
I’ve mentioned widgets in some of the previous Congruence posts, but now I’ve built a few more and I think they deserve their own recap.
My phone’s lockscreen is the interface I look at more than any other — every time I pick my phone up, I see it. And that space mostly goes underutilized.
I asked myself: if I could pick what dynamic information I want to see every time I pick up my phone, what would it be?
What you’re able to put on the lockscreen is quite restricted, which makes it a perfect fit for personal software like Congruence. I can add widgets with very minimal affordances / low clarity, because I am the only user and know exactly what they mean. I think it would be much harder to use widget space effectively for mass-market products.
So, anyway, here’s what my lockscreen looks like now:
There are four widgets:
- Top bar
- Call list
- Voice note
- Text note
The top bar — where it says “Sun 24” — has several pieces of info:
- Today’s day and date
- A phone icon that indicates whether the current device is “on” for purposes of receiving calls, or if my other phone is (this is due to my Freedom Phone setup). If the other phone is set to receive calls, then the phone icon is crossed out
- Air quality index (AQI) measurements.
For air quality, the first number (48 in screenshot) is the PurpleAir hyper-local measurement. This is calculated from nearby PurpleAir devices, which consumers leave out and connect to the network. If you’ve ever used Paku or a similar app where you can see nearby devices’ readings, it was probably PurpleAir.
The second number (50, here) is Google’s AQI measurement. This is a projected number based on Google’s modeling, rather than a direct measurement from nearby devices, so it differs a bit from PurpleAir. Then, after this number, there are two arrows — the first shows what Google projects the difference will be between the current AQI and AQI two hours from now, and the second is the difference between the AQI two hours and six hours from now. The arrows are vertical if the change is 10 AQI points or more, diagonal if 2-9 AQI points, and flat if less than 2.
This is a great example of an interface that is probably too “condensed” for mass market use cases (plus, the line overall includes several types of data that might not be relevant for all people — date, Freedom Phone, and AQI). But for a personal app it is perfect.
The second widget is the call list one. I wrote about the call list feature previously, but I found it was annoying to have the list buried in the app. So now, with a glance at my lockscreen, I can see exactly who I am supposed to call. Makes it much easier when out on a walk to start dialing.
And last, the voice and text note widgets dump me straight into Congruence where I can take notes.
Similar to using the hold-to-display image functionality of push notifications for the barcodes feature, using customized lockscreen widgets feels like a unique advantage of personal apps — it’s the type of “deep” functionality that is just rarely relevant for broader products, but is magical in the context of something personal.
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