Sol
Objective
Our mission was to understand and analyse how users interact with competitor weather apps to create a fun but functional prototyping experience.
Our Role
To provide usability and design direction to the project from start to finish.
-
Competitor Benchmarking (including analysis)
-
Usability Testing (competitor products)
-
Customer journey map
-
Flow diagram
-
Design a high fidelity prototype
-
Custom & unique icons
-
Wireframes
Competitive benchmarking
The goal was to understand/evaluate the weather apps such as, Apple, BBC, and the Met office to see how they were displaying the weather. We also investigated other third-party mobile applications such as Nest, Hive, Google home to check if they had any interesting solutions for solving a similar problem.
Flow diagram
Creating a flow diagram helps to cement the user flow and to run through the information architecture before committing to a design or sketch. This helps to ensure that less mistakes are made, and that the user flow is smooth.
Sun
Looking at ancient drawings/pictorials we came up with this simple design.
Moon
The moon has many different graphical forms, so we wanted to create a fun design with character.
Clouds
The swirls were a theme throughout these three icons, it created an intentional family feel throughout the Sol application.
Challenges
-
Not to overload the user with information
-
Making the design minimal
-
Creating an intuitive creative solution
Design decisions
Progressive disclosure
By asking to access the users live location upon opening Sol this enables the software to adapt and display current locational information.
Not to be misleading
By asking to access the users live location at the start, this enables the app to work best and it also makes it more convenient for the user when changing location
Human Characteristics
By adding a simple hello message at the top of the software this creates a human friendly interface making it polite, it also breaks down the barrier between human and machine.
Novelty
By creating a clock face which allows the user to rotate the time via a scroll wheel, allows for greater interactivity making the application more fun and playful.