Widgets are coming to Chrome on iOS! I designed and implemented them, and can’t wait to see them on your Home Screen 📱🦖 Here's a bit of behind-the-scenes on how we landed on these directions ⬇️
We started out by exploring two general directions: discovery & quick actions.
The team initially felt excited about the discovery-related directions, but was worried that suggesting new contents on the Home Screen would be either too revealing, or not personal enough.
As for the action centric ones, we looked at our existing iOS 13 Today View widgets and decided that it was important for the iOS 14 widget to offer existing shortcuts. However, we didn’t find this layout at home enough to live on the Home Screen (no pun intended...)
We then explored ways to bring more Chrome elements into them, like the tab dividers & shapes, and the Dino game. This process also inspired us to consider what other widgets we could offer that would be both personal and privacy-preserving.
While implementing the final design, we found an opportunity to add some more playfulness into the Dino widget: Dino will only appear when the widget is fully loaded.
What other widgets would you hope to see from Chrome? Let us know what ideas you've got! 🦖
Special thanks to @MartijnvdBroeck for his exploration in the content-focused directions, and @FloresRobles for helping me get familiar with our codebase and git!