IOS Weather App Redesign

This project aimed to provide a smarter solution for the IOS stock weather App. The outcome of the redesign solution might help users to adapt their preferences in a way to save their time and energy of making sense of the existing weather information. Thus, make users’ life better in a smooth and semi-conscious way.

In order to understand more about users’ behavior and preference on Weather, in addition to the pre-research survey, we interview 6 users virtually to understand their everyday Weather apps usage and their preferences toward ordering different types of forecasts in the apps.

After we creating the affinity diagram and persona, we decided to focus on redesigning to promote the connection of Weather App with other IOS Apps, with the feature of smartly helping users understand and making use of the weather information.

Among the 100 survey participants, we found there are several common scenarios they would interact with the weather app. More specific information like the rain forecast can become more valuable when people get up; and the forecasts for the next several days can be handy when planning on trips.

87% of participants favored the idea of presenting daily forecasts as part of the wake-up alarm. During the interview, we also knew that presenting weather-related information in other IOS stock app is appealing to users.

According to our interview results, we found that some people took a steep learning curve to make sense of the information provided by the current Weather App. For example, many of them did not understand what the value of UV index means.
In order to make it easier for users to get a feeling of a certain value. We decided to add descriptive tags (as shown below) to help users quickly achieve their expectations of the weather information.

Current IOS Weather does not display any warning inside the app. This might due to the weather bureau’s obligation usually send people extreme weather notifications. However, according to our interview results, some people will disable this kind of notifications, while this kind of warning is still desired for them.

Based on our interview, we found most users have a similar pattern of checking the weather when they get up. Bedtime is a tab inside the Clock app that contains an alarm clock that wakes users up. We thought it might be useful to redesign the current Bedtime Alarm by implementing the weather report feature.

The original Bedtime alarm contains a long text description on the wake-up screen, which a user won’t normally read while the alarm is ringing. Once users dismiss the alarm, they won’t be able to review the weather report again. Therefore, the current IOS weather report of the alarm screen seems redundant and meaningless.
I redesigned the alarm screen by only representing users with more significant information (weather, temperature, and feels-like temperature) that found from the preliminary research. In this case, users can read the weather more efficiently. The location of the weather report now will display after users dismiss the wake-up alarm. In this case, users will have enough time to read the information.

Feature III: Reinforce the connection between event and weather

We learned that users have strong needs for weather information while doing events like outdoor activities and fight. We decide to link the IOS Weather app with its event apps like Reminder and Calendar to ease users’ efforts of acquiring weather information in the contexts they desire.

Tony Zhou (Designer), Jingxuan Yu (Designer), Jay Li (Designer), Sybil Wang (Researcher), Owen Hu (Researcher)

This is a class project for Intelligent User Interface at Cornell University. It takes 3 weeks for the group to finish the project. Thank you for the assistant from Dan Cosley and Negar Khojasteh.

Related posts:

I have to start somewhere. A bit of clarity perhaps. What is it that I want to write about? And why. This backlog file will grow as I’ll put in the ideas that scratch me. The ones demanding for more…

Aerial photography has become indispensable in the real estate industry. Realtors know the value of exceptional visuals. By adding aerial shots to their listings, they can generate more interest in…

You were in my thoughts all weekend. First and foremost, how are you doing? Let me know in the comments. I hope you are well. While I am still able to work full-time from home I know that many…