A few thoughts combined today which saw me rapidly put together this initial idea for an iPhone weather app. It’s a hot day here in Melbourne so lots of folks have been checking the weather to see how hot it is and when a change is due. People can get pretty obsessed by the weather, certainly all the users I tested when working on White Pages loved to know what the forecast was and I must admit it’s the first thing I check in the morning so I know what to wear when I hop on the bike and head off to work.
Recently I saw a website that presented the days temperatures on a line graph and I really liked the concept, it’s much nicer to have the days temperature shown on a line graph so you can instantly see how it’s trending. I can’t remember what site I saw it on (I’ll update this post when I find it) but the execution of it wasn’t great. So I thought I’d design something similar for the iPhone (to add to all the weather apps out there) and here is my first draft:
iPhone Weather App Concept
I’ve got a few other ideas I’d like to try incorporating too, like:
- Compressing the mornings and elongating the daylight hours – how many people care about the wee hours really. This would make the more relevant information prominent.
- Adding the textual forecast information in one of the corners, e.g “Partly cloudy. Winds north to….”
- Adding a tiny right-hand side column showing the forecast for the coming few days.
This to me is the ideal home screen for a weather app – all the information I want to know prioritised and presented in an easy to absorb way. What do you think – like it or not? Should I try and develop it? Got any suggestions?
Comment by Jessica Enders — February 7, 2010 @ 10:59 am
Hi James
Nice idea. Really like it.
My personal suggestions would be:
- make the current temp bigger and thus easier to see at a real glance
- style the minimum in the same was as the maximum, e.g. with a tangential line and the callout coming to the side
- use different colours for the minimum and maximum, and not necessarily red as the max won’t always be hot
- allow the user to say what hours interest them the most (in case they are shift workers or whatever, like my anaesthetist friends)
- make it swish nicely to the right and left to show the temps in the surrounding days, past and present
If you could do all that, and have it:
- be accurate
- update quickly
- show the current temp and weather in the icon, like the iCal icon shows the date
I’d happily pay up to $10 for it!
Comment by Ben Green — February 9, 2010 @ 6:48 am
Hi James,
This looks great. Love the movement across the screen, and the daylight hours representation – great visual elements that I haven’t seen before in a weather app.
For me though, it doesn’t address the way that I get a weather forecast at the moment. (It’s all me me me around here.)
I check weather in the morning and I want to know
1. Top temperature for the day
2. Will it rain
So for me I would visually prioritise the peak temperature to be the pre-eminent piece of information on the screen.
And from what I can see above, the rain/shine icon only appears for the current time, so if there’s a downpour at 6.30pm I won’t know. Doesn’t seem straightforward to accommodate the inclusion of icons that indicate rain at some point, particularly if there’s multiple shower throughout the day, but I’d need to know that for it to be useful for me as a weather app.
And would the display move to the left? So it it’s 6pm will my view be from noon to midnight?
I love the look of this – I keep coming back to look at it. It’s the movement that gets me, I just haven’t seen the visual continuum used before and it’s very compelling.
Comment by Brett Collinson — February 9, 2010 @ 10:24 am
Nice draft James. I can see this being really useful.
I’m with both Ben and Jessica on the feedback. Being a cyclist, I care about rain, night or day. I want to know when a change will happen. And max temperature.
Visually I’d move the sunrise/set text labels to be little icons with times underneath that sit on the light/dark border on the image itself and remove from the screen header.
Look forward to seeing the next version (and the app!)
Comment by Crappy — February 9, 2010 @ 10:38 am
Hi James,
really like the UI. I understand you are still evolving this too, so I support your evolutionary thinking. Location drives my weather choices and also bracketing certain times around activities. So weather updates would be good and also weather warnings somehow synced with a calendar. If it can be geo specific too that would be a bonus as it will be heavily linked to what’s around me in terms of planning. How frequently would it be updated?
The graphed nature of it is a terrific way to represent weather. I can see other logical graphed overlays too. If you take the age info for instance then seasons of the year may place emphasis on pollen count, pollution snow depth etc.
Keep plowing through though I am instantly engaged.
Comment by Paul Annesley — February 9, 2010 @ 2:45 pm
Here’s the geeky graph website you mentioned, clearly designed by the programmer:
http://www.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/~awatkins/melbtemp.html
I’m up for writing some Cocoa/Objective-C and web services to get the thing working.
Comment by james — February 12, 2010 @ 3:26 pm
Wow $10 for it, I’ll get building now!
Thanks for the feedback Jessica, some good points and ideas in there.
Comment by james — February 12, 2010 @ 3:30 pm
Thanks for the link and the offer Paul. Not having the first idea about how to develop an iPhone app I might have to take you up on offer.
Comment by james — February 12, 2010 @ 3:34 pm
Thanks for all the feedback and suggestions folks, I’ll certainly be feeding it all into the next iteration of the design. It’s wonderful to get so much feedback and support for it, very encouraging indeed.
Pingback by James Mansfield » Blog Archive » iPhone weather app – version 2 — February 13, 2010 @ 12:34 am
[...] the encouraging feedback and great suggestions I had after publishing my initial iPhone weather app concept it’s full steam ahead with version two. In this version I’ve added more information to [...]
Comment by Craig Taylor — February 21, 2010 @ 12:08 pm
Build it and they will come…
Comment by Craig Taylor — February 21, 2010 @ 8:54 pm
I was planning to write a couple of apps I have ideas for but the $1,000 entry fee is annoying.