Skies: A Weather App
FALL 2019 – RESEARCH, STRATEGY, UX
‘Skies’ is a conceptual exploration of a real-time, local, user-sourced weather app, bridging the gap between numerical, highly accurate forecasting, with the ever poetic, human experience of the current weather and skies.
CONCEPT
Since the beginning of time, humans have had a complex and beautiful relationship with the weather. It affects our mood, determines where we live, what food we eat, what we wear, how we spend our days, our culture, our poetry and songs, our idioms and metaphors, our language and much more.
Even today when many of us live in digital worlds completely detached from the rhythms of nature, the weather remains a constant source of connection to the cycles and temper of the natural world that is our immediate surroundings. We still take awe at shapeshifting clouds and hold our lovers close in thunderstorms, daydream watching snowfalls and delight in the light of evening golden hour strolls.
RESEARCH + INSIGHT
And yet–the current digital tools we use to track and check the weather on a daily basis completely lack any experiential, sensual or human quality in the data they provide.
The research goal was to find out not only what tools and features people use, when and why they check the weather; but also what the emotional, human relationship and needs they had with the weather was. Understanding both practical/logistical and emotional/human problems would be the key to unlocking unique user needs.
The existing apps are lacking in a human voice and tone, and won’t provide personalized or experiential data on the weather.
I surveyed and interviewed users from all over the world, to get both qualitative + quantitative data, to represent a location and demographic agnostic pool of research. As I had hypothesized, the overwhelming majority of findings were rooted in emotional and personalized needs in relationship to the weather, no matter the location or demographic.
In terms of features, the most used two features overall were the temperature and humidity. The next few preferred features though, seemed to have a location-dependent pattern: for example, while New Yorkers were likely to be checking humidity levels, people from the tropics were more in favor of the storm radar feature. This led me to design for a customizable deck so that users can choose to add/omit features to their preference, further personalizing the app.
Information architecture analysis of the most popular weather apps, and the finalized IA for ‘Skies.’
DESIGN + DEVELOPMENT
After mapping out the information architecture and main features, the main goal based on the research was to keep the interface simple, clean and give a feeling of what it’s like outside at a glance. The additional features were designed to reveal and hide themselves during use in order and time of relevance.
Scroll based timeline allows users to easily navigate between hourly and daily forecast, as well as the ability to scroll to past data for comparison.
NOTABLE FEATURES
Personalized forecasting and suggestions was another major user need and became an important differentiatior for Skies. Users are prompted to create personalized notifications while onboarding, and to opt-in to daily check-ins about how they felt about the weather to better personalize their notifications and suggestions.
Onboarding allows users to customize their notifications based on personal preferences, as well as the option to jot down personal preferences at the end of each day to better customize data.
One of the quite interesting finds was when I asked how users checked the weather, second to checking the weather app on their phone, a majority of people responded that they looked outside at the sky. Others also said that they look outside at what people are wearing and ask someone who’s been outside that day.
Share flow on Skies, familiar from other social platforms for ease of use and fast learning curve.
While some apps did have a sharing feature, this only included the current temperature, and didn’t create the enough incentive or curiosity to be shared by the user. So I designed a ‘stories’ feature, where, users are able to share and watch local, real-time reports of what it feels like outside. This feature mimics flows from other popular real-time sharing apps such as Instagram and Snapchat, allowing for an easy learning curve.
This feature, although seemingly simple, satisfies all the mega-themes I had found in the user needs insights; as well as increasing potential of sharing and therefore satisfying business needs.
