UPS’s brief: extend Widget 1.0 to 19 markets round the world, build his popularity and drive increased usage of the application.

The UPS Widget 1.0 application enabled UPS to occupy the most valuable media real estate, of their most valuable audience – the shipping managers’ desktop. Since his birth in 2007 Widget has been hard at work tracking parcels for 80,000 Shipping Managers, across 6 countries. UPS’s friendly desktop app was a big hit as he enabled, highly stressed, time-poor shipping managers to manually request package tracking status information. He also enabled UPS to send direct communications to those who had downloaded him.

After extensive usability tests of the existing application and site, our interaction designers re-architected the Widget to create a more seamless user experience. We adopted an agile design and build methodology with continuous user feedback and testing.

This resulted in Widget 2.0 application; an improved user experience, a new interface design, 5 downloadable skins, available from his new web site, a Widget dress-up and mash up tool and his own Facebook fan page.

In the first three months Widget’s site had over 3 million visitors and was downloaded by 200,000 new shipping friends.

Over 2000 of his shippers’ have dressed him up in his various outfits using the widget dresser tool. He now has a total of 2,500 friends on his Facebook fan page.