Desktop collaboration widget

Qontext wanted an interactive, rich, cross-platform, desktop widget that would work with their successful collaboration platform. Imaginea's Interactive Design team was tasked with doing the Interaction Design and full implementation of Qontext Pulse™- the desktop widget.

The immediate challenges when developing Qontext Pulse were:

1. Desktop widget had to be right-sized: not hampering other work, while ensuring meaningful collaboration
2. Positioning of the widget and its elements had to be non-intrusive, for user acceptance
3. Smooth display of real-time information from various sources.
4. Different types of information needed a clear, recognizable place in the widget layout
5. Widget had to make optimal use of background CPU

The team provided six widget options using Photoshop. AIR™ was chosen for its proven technologies to build cross-platform RIA that run outside the browser.

Qontext Pulse uses custom chrome for a rich look and feel, and to ensure the widget looks the same regardless of the OS. The tabular interface displays alerts, requests and short messages, using which, an user can track enterprise events. It uses secure REST API (developed for Qontext portal) invocation over HTTP using authentication token and SSL to communicate with the server.