Location Options and Support

Location Nicknames: If the user taps to follow a location that is a weather station and not a city, they will be prompted to give the location an optional nickname, if they would like to (see screen 1). The nickname would provide a stronger location association to the user in comparison to the weather station name set by its owner or an address. A preview of the location is shown for reference and to help the user more easily find it once they go back to their location list.

User-Relevant Functionality: Users will have access to certain editing functionality based on their user type. If they are a weather station owner, they can see the options refresh data and edit device settings. If they are an app-only user, they can see the options refresh data and follow if they have not followed the location, or edit nickname and unfollow location if they have (see 2).

Location-Relevant Labels: Users will have access to certain sharing functionality based on the weather information screen type (i.e. personal or business weather station and city). The change in labelling will solve the previous problem of confusion surrounding sharing ambiguity. If it is a weather station location, users will be able to save photo, share photo, and share device page. If the weather station belongs to a business, users will be able to share location page instead of share device page. If it is a city location, users will be able to save photo collage, share photo collage, and share city page (see 3).

Options via Gestures: Based on existing user affordances, tapping and holding a photo will also give the user options to save or share the photo in addition to finding these options in the top right hand more icon. Dragging the screen down will also give the user the ability to refresh the data (see 4–5). This makes frequently used options easier to access via gestures instead of tapping multiple times through menus and options.

Weather Station Help: Weather station status icons can be tapped to learn more about the weather station statuses and quickly take action if necessary (see 6–7). This accounts for the previous problem of lack of app states and feedback for errors, which lead to user confusion and frustration. Common states with customized screens are error, low battery, offline, and sleeping. At the bottom of each of the help texts are a call-to-action to contact BloomSky support.

Friendly Weather Alerts: In the direction of our vision of humanized weather and in an effort to make weather alerts more user-friendly (not in a giant paragraph of all caps text), an idea was created to divide weather alerts into scannable sections with clear headers in sentence-case text (see 8).