A long time ago—before Gmail ditched the red envelope logo, before Periscope and Vine were acquired and shuddered by Twitter, well before the bluebird app gained its edit button—was the first era of modern web design.
I’m not talking about the garage offices of Google, Amazon, or any of that Silicon Valley lore. The earliest of early days were about uncertain bets; the web was still going from nothing to something. But after the web started to take shape similar to its current form, we started to see real, repeatable trends in software design.
In particular, one trend that has shape-shifted throughout history was that of third-party embedded apps, often called widgets.
At any point in modern web history, there were products on both ends of this spectrum: those that heavily used third-party widgets and those that shunned them. However, third-party widgets have shifted (and shifted back) in popularity over the years. This piece explains why those trends happened.
As the web started to hit mass adoption, a laundry list of expected features grew. Any news site—even a blog—was expected to have a commenting feature. Also an RSS feature. And social media like and share buttons.
For other apps, social sign-on became commonplace. So did internal pop-ups. And sign-up boxes to subscribe to newsletters and such.Building these features typically wasn’t too hard, but they added to ever-growing engineering dockets. So, engineers leveraged widgets—little plug-and-play interfaces that took care of table-stakes features.
Again, what more could you want? Well … brand. (Explo*).
At some point, around the early 2010s, we experienced a shift to in-housing everything surrounding app development. Suddenly, widgets were cheap. Widgets were tacky. They were associated with hacky Google Sites and Tumblr blogs that were sharply going out of style.
Professional websites couldn’t afford to appear pre-manufactured anymore. Or less vainly, professional websites couldn’t afford to have limited, non-extensible widgets anymore. Engineering and design teams wanted to craft an end-to-end experience form-fitted for the website’s users’ needs. Anything else was inexcusable.
Today, widgets are everywhere. They just look and feel different.
Netlify, Gusto, Yotpo, and Freshworks have wonderbars (action-packed searchbars similar to Superhuman’s), all powered by CommandBar.
Gitbook, Pitch, and Stacksi have their notifications panel powered by Magicbell.
*Explo is an embedded analytics product that powers dashboards like:
