Weather Information

General Solutions: The weather information screen is the meat and bones of the app. It provides the values and promises that BloomSky holds for its customers and users. A few methods were used to handle the previous problems of confusion, distraction, and unreadability found in the weather information screens. The information is sorted and grouped by importance and relationship to one another. Iconography was based on existing icon languages and used to support & bring focus to information. Clear labels and headings were used to designate and provide context for information. Past, current, and future weather data are clearly separated & labeled; and connected through animations and spatial context for stronger conceptual understanding. Visual noise of foreign data was decreased through grouping, sorting, visual treatment, and explanations that can be accessed by tapping on the data (see screens 1–4).

Data: All variations of the weather information screen contain current and forecasted weather. The current weather data contains location name or nickname if available, data time, camera image, station status, extreme weather alert if available, temperature, relative temperature via time, temperature high and low, condition, rain, wind, UV, humidity, pressure, and sunrise & sunset. The forcasted weather data contains hourly conditions & temperature for up to 24 hours (if the section is expanded) and daily conditions with high & low temperatures for up to 10 days (if the section is expanded). The low temperatures are staggered to show when the low temperature will occur (i.e. between the night of that day and the morning of the next day) (see 1–4).

Weather Station Screen Variations: The weather station variation also contains station profile and historic data. Businesses can display their address; long-holding the address will copy it with a copy confirmation appearing after 1 second, and tapping the address will prompt the user to confirm opening Google Maps if installed, Apple Maps if not, to navigate to the location (see 1–2). The weather station variation that would be accessed from the search will have a follow button for users to add to their personal list and will be missing the tab navigation at the bottom, which would force users to exit only via the back button and be a reminder that they are in search mode, ensuring wayfinding soundness (see 2).

City Screen Variations: The city variation contains a collage of weather photos versus the single one, so users will be able to gain a better understanding of the overall city view. The collage of photos can be shuffled to show different stations and tapped for further exploration of individual stations (see 3). The third-party-data city variation would not have enough BloomSky weather stations to provide accurate city weather averages through BloomSky data, so it would have no photo and contain a call-to-action to expand the BloomSky weather station network (see 4). With this alternative solution, we strived to begin tackling the product distribution problem that affected many users who could not get meaningful local weather due to too wide of an area of initial product distribution.