"This app seems to have been designed by people who understand how and why people use weather forecasts..." RussetRob, App Store Review
THE BRIEF
With so many weather apps out there, the BBC Weather team want to translate the BBC Weather website into a native app experience that would stand out from the crowd. This was achieved through ease of use, quality interaction design and a visual focus on the historic iconography which elevated the app above all others.
MY ROLE
As the main UX designer on this project, it was my role to establish guiding principles, organise workshops, concept ideas, prototypes to improve and validate the interactions and information hierarchy, document user flows and final UX specification for hand over to the BBC in-house development team.
BRAINSTORMING & WORKSHOPS
The initial brainstorming with myself and the lead visual designer established key features, experience goals and interaction ideas that were brought into the concept stage. This lead to scenario development based off the personas developed by the BBC team and an initial feature list which was then prioritised in a workshop with the BBC Weather team.
An example of the touch points throughout the day for one of the personas.
For the workshop we created giant mobile and tablets and had them up on the wall. With post-it notes, we got all the team to think about the information and features they would like to see first, second and third. This lead establishing which features were essential, nice-to-haves and not relevant.
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
For mobile users it was about immediacy, accessing critical information quickly and at a glance. For tablet users while immediacy is important, it was about planning, browsing, and ‘telling the weather story’. Starting initially with mobile, and using the feature prioritisation from the discovery phase, the concepts leveraged the most successful aspects of the BBC Weather website and translated them to a native experience. I created three prototypes of the mobile concepts to present back to the weather team, to get a better feel for how the concepts would work and which had the most potential.
Once the mobile pattern was established, the pattern was translated across to the tablet designs with the additional functionality and information that was decided during the workshops.
CONCEPT REFINEMENT & USER TESTING
The below images illustrate the interaction model that was selected and prototyped, with two scrollable areas one for the day and one for the week. User testing was conducted by the client to establish if switching between locations should be on the horizontal or vertical. The result was a vertical scroll to switch between locations, and to keep day information on the horizontal swipe.
DETAILED DESIGN & specification
Search, weather alerts and settings were detailed after user testing. I created flows and walk-throughs of how the user would search and add locations, manage their settings and set their weather their alerts. As the project progressed, several features such as alerts, sharing and social, were explored. These explorations were presented to the client, however after discussion they were de-scoped - the client felt that the core functionality and simplicity of the interaction model were being overshadowed, which I agreed with. With the user experience locked down, I created detailed specification guidelines, whilst the final visual design was completed by another team member. The UX and visual design was then handed over to the BBC Weather team for development.
THE OUTCOME
2 million downloads within the first two weeks and over 10 million downloads, the app is still recognised as one of the best weather apps in the UK and is currently top of the weather app chart for iOS. The success centres on the strong, easy-to-use and minimalistic interaction pattern which has held up over the last four years.
Even in 2017, the app is still getting reviews like this: "The big names don't always get it right with their apps but the BBC Weather app certainly does, mixing masses of useful info with high levels of accuracy and a carefully crafted design that brings a sense of the weather conditions right into your phone or tablet." - T3
