Comment by doctoboggan
3 years ago
If rain is forecast in the next hour they put the minute by minute graph at the top front and center in the iOS weather app.
3 years ago
If rain is forecast in the next hour they put the minute by minute graph at the top front and center in the iOS weather app.
Not good enough. I'm going to be out for the whole day: do I need an umbrella? I want to know that immediately. It's such basic information that it needs to be always at hand.
The app also tells you that. For example at the top of the app now I see a message “Rainy conditions expected around 3pm”
Author here!
There's definitely a taste / opinion component to any deep design critique. I think for many (for whom the post resonated), the ability to quickly glance at Dark Sky and understand relevant weather contextually was THE game changer.
It's a hard thing to discuss, because until you've felt the experience, it doesn't seem like a "big deal".
Some apps do use text to talk about the current / upcoming rain, but showing it visually makes it even easier. The ease of use is important because weather apps aren't meant to be that interactive (like a game). They're meant to be context-sensitive information graphics that let you drop in and out very very quickly.
http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#inferring_context_from_the_e...
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As the author points out, text like that is inferior to embedding information in the graphic. The reason is that with text, I have to just "hope" that they've handled all the cases that I care about, and at the fidelity that is relevant to me. With a graphic, this information is always available, and combining multiple elements tells me more information than a single text snippet can. For example: "Oh, it's only going to be drizzly for like an hour, I'll be in a meeting around then anyways." That's a decision that 'rainy conditions expected around 3pm' does not help me with.
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