Goal
Redesign Personal Weather Station (PWS) pages in order to attract and retain PWS owners who share their data via the Weather Underground network, and engage a wider variety of data-intensive hobby and professional users.
Results
I was able to provide a more attractive dashboard that included interactive data views to allow weather-obsessive users to engage more deeply with data on which they relied for their pastimes, work and daily lives.
Team
I worked with a team consisting of a meteorologist/product manager, visual designer, front-end and back-end developers.
User Research
For user research, I worked with the product manager to create and conduct online surveys and phone interviews. We discovered a plethora of unexpected and inspirational use cases from both PWS owners and non-owners, as well as their required features and priorities.
From owners, we discovered a wide variety of use cases from monitoring home vineyard humidity to know when to spray their grapes with fungicides, predicting energy usage in buildings, identifying dry days to set out feed on a hunting ranch, or determining remotely if their mountain home driveway entrance would be covered with snow when they returned from work.
Non-owner consumers of PWS data described an astonishing range of uses, from biking and sailing to construction work, analysis of the effect of weather on sales, as well as animal research.
I also also put myself in the shoes of a PWS owner by installing a PWS for a user on the roof of their San Francisco home as well as connecting the PWS to Weather Underground's network.
Based on our research, the product manager and I worked out user journeys for on-demand data consumption (both local and remote) as well as historical data analysis. We then grouped and prioritized features for each step in the journey.
Ideation and Prototyping
Along with user needs categorization and feature prioritization, I provided interaction and notification flows, as well as wireframes and prototypes for desktop and tablet UIs. I built local and online prototypes which were tested with users with varying uses cases to validate user comprehension, priorities and user satisfaction.
Wireframe: PWS Dashboard Overview was the default screen for an individual PWS.
Wireframe: Graph View displayed multiple charts so users could see relationships between weather variables such as wind speed and direction, precipitation, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure.
Wireframe: Location and PWS selector map
Wireframe: Data View allowed users to interact with and customize raw data by time period and weather data type. They could also download the customized dataset in various file formats.
Design & Production
During production, I worked with a visual designer and developers to ensure the proper execution of interaction details for functions like interactive graphing and switching between data views.
Production: PWS Dashboard Overview provided a default map and weather data view, as well as a webcam view (depending on the functionality of the PWS).
Production: Graph View displayed live, dynamic data which users could customize and interact with.
Production: In the Dashboard Overview, users could customize the map view by focusing on specific weather data like temperature, wind, humidity and precipitation, some of which included predictive, animated satellite visualizations
Production: Table View displayed historical data and enabled customization and downloads.