STEPHANIE LUDWIG
UX and Strategy for AI/ML-led Products • Conversation Designer
Snapshot
Bite-size weather for your day
THE WEATHER CHANNEL
ROLE: Strategic Vision, Discovery, UI, UX
The popularity of Instagram Stories inspired us to think about what a Weather version could look like.
Our vision was to create an affective and visual series that provides a rich contextual snapshot of the user’s day.
Questions we wished to answer:
Can we increase our social presence and appeal to a younger audience?
Could we concentrate the primary utility of th app into a beautiful and bite-sized experience?
Considerations:
Can it be different enough from the app to justify its existance?
Can it span the evolution of the current app experience?
Intense user testing with interactive prototypes indicated that people liked the nuts and bolts of the experience. We had a group of 12 participants, half TWC app users, in a range of demographics, interact with different sets of cards. Card groupings were based on previous data about app usage. Results from testing were mapped to a plan for the MVP. Final cards included forecasts, editorial content and ads.
Process
MVP user flow to show interactions and themes. Color explorations reflected a new idea for TWC: the feeling of weather conditions. 100's of imagery, data, and animation combinations were created, (including a stop-motion movie), and tested, to find the the perfect balance of utility/beauty/stickiness.
The final card set for the beta version included a loading screen, two forecasts, editorial content and an ad. The content was updated about every 5 minutes. Users launched the experience from the app homescreen.
Conclusion: Snapshot was launched as n MVP in the blue app experience for testing. It performed well enough with the 20% of users that saw it in the app that it was added as a feature to the new app design. People that interacted with it tended to use it once a day, in the morning. The feature ran as a Beta for about 6 months, but was not optimized. It was sunset due to feedback that it was competing with other new features.