j. paul arterburn

Right now most of the daily deal sites require you to put in your email before you can even view the deals for any particular city. This is so they can send you daily reminders of what the deal of the day is; this isn’t exactly the best user experience in my eyes. It’s certainly best for the daily deal companies, I understand, as it’s putting their content in front of you without you having to do anything different from your normal daily online behavior. You’re going to check email, twitter, facebook, and a few news sites likely every time you connect. If a company can put their content in one of these mediums (or all of them) they have a higher chance of clicking with you, pun intended.

What I didn’t want to do with preVU was what I hated with the other sites and force-require an email address for this sole purpose (I would, however, like to at least provide that option in the future if a user desires the daily emails). I set out to come up with a creative solution that is both effortless but not aggressive and landed on this: gadgets - or widgets, whatever you want to call them. Starting with iGoogle & Gmail as well as the iframe solution that website owners can install on their own sites if serving a local crowd.

It’s a simple 1-click install to add the gadget to your iGoogle home page: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=ig.pre.vu/prevu.xml

It takes a few more steps to get it working in Gmail, but it’s well worth it: How to add gadgets to Gmail

This is what shows when you click on the title of the gadget (“preVU »”)