Weather Commuter: A UX Case Study

The UX behind the need to checking the weather

Persona

The persona I interviewed were young adults ranging from the age of 20–30 yrs old. I mainly focused on busy college students. All my users have checked the weather either daily for the purpose of commute, or weekly for the purpose of vacationing or weekend planning. The most common, and most often concern was veering more towards the daily commute, as opposed to the non so frequent vacationing. I therefore chose to work on that as my main users issue, and bagan to brainstorm a possible solution.

User Stories

Jane wakes up in the morning, and quickly scrolls through her weather app in order to know what to wear. Her 1 hour commute both ways consists of train, metro, and a 7 minute walk. The main concern for her is that she should be properly dressed for both ways.

I chose to sketch this story in a sample storyboard as well.

Before beginning my testing I mapped out my own connections to weather and began my research to know better for myself what to asking my interviewers.

Besides my interviews, part of my research was searching similar weather apps and going through the reviews of actual users. Many issues were ads, and slowing down users devices at times which didn’t help me much. However I did see many users liked having the 10 day forecast, alerts, saved cities, and nice pictures per city. I have added these basic, more classic features as well.

My interviews consisted of a slew of very unbiased broad and open ended questions. My beginner question was “what drives you to go and check what the weather is going to be on any given day?” .

These questions led me to much back and forth, including preferences in regards to hourly or weekly forecasts, as well as much debate in real feel or actual feel. There were also desires for alerts, precipitation, wind etc.

Identifying and Prioritising Pain Points

The most common reason for checking the weather however was to know the daily commute, as opposed to the non so frequent vacationing (10 day). I therefore chose to work on that as my main users issue, and began to brainstorm a possible solution.

Defining the Problem

The main concern for the users i’ve interviewed was not knowing what to wear daily due to constant changes in weather patterns. The weather application is a way for the user to be at ease knowing they’re properly dressed for whatever the day will bring.

Ideating the Solution

Current applications have an hourly layout which would require the user to scroll from their given morning commute to the evening back home commute. Being that user has no interest in the rest of the day, and at times of year the temperature can change dramatically throughout the day, this will alleviate much time to know how to properly prepare.

Takeaways

The most important things I learned from this project was sometimes it can be so simple to solve the problem at hand. I’ve also learned to focus my efforts much more on having basic functions in a given app, and not being overly complex. One must focus on simplicity as much as possible.

Moving forward I’d love to revamp my prototype by redoing my original sketches and starting from scratch on that. I’d also like to embellish and get real time results on how long people are truly spending checking on their daily weather concerns.

Thanks to all for providing feedback, please continue. Stay warm!

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