Persona 1 – Enthusiast

This persona is partially based on the interview with Ahmed, but mostly derived from my own experience in the weather community

Initial mockup

Will be updated after proper requirements gathering

Interview

This aims to fulfill point three of the HCI coursework specification:

Records of interviews with your client and/or users. Describe how you prepared for the interview and include the questions that you asked

I decided to conduct some informal interviews with people I know in order to help me deduce the app requirements.  People were pre-selected so that they had some interest in the weather (however minor), and as wide a range of user backgrounds as possible was chosen to best reflect the smartphone demographic. This has to be within reason for this project – though this is the biggest downside since I don’t have ready access to a range of class or location backgrounds – most people I know are middle class and English.  Fortunately, though, most app users are young (http://www.weareapps.com/app_facts.html), so I have chosen to interview two students on this course and one, older, family member. My own experience being a weather fanatic and communicating with other such beings will further guide me in requirements-gathering.

I generated a basic script using the principles covered in lectures (e.g. avoid leading and long questions), but this was only for a guide – i.e. I planned for a semi-structured interview. Responses were recorded on paper in note form so I will present only my conclusions from each participant. As suiting the interview style, a relaxed location was chosen for conducting the interviews (at home or in the computer labs when not busy).

Questions

• What weather apps (or websites) do you use / like?
• How interested are you in the weather? What aspects?
• Have you had experience with a feature to compare the weather in different locations?
• What are your thoughts on this feature as you have experienced it in apps you have used?
• Would you like to see this feature developed?
• What are your feelings on the graphics of weather apps in general?
• What are your feelings on user customisation in apps in general?
• And how about the use of animation? Is performance an issue?
• — Now I explain my app idea —
• Are there features of my app that interest you?
• Anything missing you would like to see?
• — Ask about specific features if they raise them —

Results

Pending completion of interview process…

Names have been changed to preserve anonymity

James (15-35)

Uses basic weather apps like the default Apple one (which displays current temperature and condition icon, and a basic forecast for a number of user-defined locations). This is more than enough for him so he has no interest in the features of my app, but he kindly looked at my idea and gave some feedback:

• Weather apps should pay significant attention to graphics and animation – it is on par with performance
• Travellers (business, gap year, holiday-makers) may be a good target demographic
• Most weather apps with the location compare feature allow the user to change the number of locations displayed – may be something to look at for my app
• Thinks that users will mostly be power users so consider features to cater for weather experts.

Conclusion: some good ideas, but not target user so will have to weight this interview in light of this.

Jules (40+)

Uses Met Office app to check latest weather and view forecasts for her home town (London). Only looks at weather in other cities if she is visiting them. She claims to be ‘fascinated by the weather’, but this seems limited to observing temperature swings day by day – especially in winter. She checks the temperature using the MetO app, but hasn’t tried an app which simultaneously compares different locations. However, she thankfully was interested in the idea – “I sometimes like to see how much colder/warmer it is in Italy where I go on holiday every year” – she does this through occasional reading of the weather page in newspapers (all seem to do a global roundup these days). Graphics/ animation are not a big deal to her – she just wants the information to be easily and quickly accessible. Here is a roundup of her thoughts on the feature of my app:

• Temperature / weather is main concern – maybe rainfall but nothing more
• Keep the main page simple – doesn’t want to be searching for the right icon
• Not interested in obscure places, just the main global cities.

Conclusion: These sort of lightweight users could be a big customer base if I focus on a clean, uncluttered interface, though it does seem the weather interest is needed.

Ahmed (15-35)

Uses the default Android weather app. Tried a more detailed one once (thinks it was GoWeather), but found that he didn’t use it. However, he says he is interested in the weather and does check out websites like the Met Office and Netweather (a popular site catering mostly for enthusiasts) when there is something going on (snow, storms, heat, cold). Therefore in times when there is “extreme weather like the recent floods” he would like to see how different places in the UK compare. I suggest another example – the European heat wave of 2003 – and he confirms that such an event would lead him to want to compare European cities. This leads to an interesting idea for my app whereby the  user could switch between different panels – one for local (e.g. the UK), one for regional (e.g. Europe), and one for global cities. As for graphics / animation – the conclusion is that for this sort of thing he would not be as interested as in other apps because “it is more about the data visualisation – focus on that”. Some other points

• Probably going to be used almost exclusively by enthusiasts – focus on their needs
• Data quality is important for this group as they know their stuff – people get annoyed by incorrect data if that is the main feature

Conclusion: Just the sort of user I’m looking for, and the most enthusiastic, so will weight his views accordingly.

Discussion

Unfortunately it seems the level of interest in the weather needed to use my app is higher than the typical app user (James), so I will have to focus on catering for the smaller market of weather enthusiasts (Jules and Ahmed being at he lowest end of this scale). So this is my target user. I have gathered lots of ideas from these interviews and will now draw up my requirements based on these and on my own knowledge of the high end weather enthusiast (e.g. me).

WxApp Competitor Analysis

This aims to cover point two of the HCI specification:

A competitor analysis – describe the strengths, weaknesses of existing competitor apps and identify any opportunities for your app, for example, is there any functionality that you could implement that no other app provides?

To my knowledge, after searching Google Play and online, there are no applications that have a tile-based city weather comparison feature. I found a few that do have features for comparing weather in different locations, though always as part of a much larger application and not using a visual grid interface. I will perform a competitor analysis on the main android apps I found that have a feature for comparing LIVE or HISTORICAL weather in different cities. FORECAST comparing apps were ignored as this is not one of the ideas I came up with in my brainstorm so I have no intention of including this feature.

The apps I will compare and the type of location comparing they do

Weather Underground – Map

Go Weather EX – List

Android Weather – Map

Weather Tunnel – List

Weather Underground

A flashy app with animation, map overlay, nice icons and a wealth of information. However, it is slow, feature-heavy, and often unresponsive (feedback!) . The comparison feature has colour-coding but as it is a map, you are limited to viewing locations around a given location (comparing London and LA is impossible).

Pros: Good graphics, detailed information, live updates, very many cities/locations, colour-coding.

Cons: Slow, has adverts, restricted to one weather variable (temperature), limited settings options.

Go Weather EX

One of the most installed weather apps on the market with several million downloads, and 4 star rating. A focus on flashiness may explain this (video backgrounds, claimed HD). Comparing is either via small icons in-app, or big icons as a widget. Not colour-coded.

Pros: excellent graphics, really clean UI

Cons: pesters user to upgrade to paid-version, again limited to temperature and  a condition icon.

Android Weather

This is a simple app that lets you save cities and flick through them to view the weather, but not compare the cities directly in this way. The comparison is done on a map with pre-defined cities, each with a large bubble giving a weather conditions icon and the temperature (not colour-coded).

Pros: Broad and detailed settings for units and data updates, nice fonts and icons, uses gestures

Cons: Adverts, poor UI design (dead-ends, missing buttons etc.) , very limited number of cities on the map (only two in the whole of the southern hemisphere!),  limited to comparing temperature and weather condition.

Weather Tunnel

Basic app with limited graphics and no colour-coding. The location comparator is in a list view so distant locations can easily be compared.

Pros: Quick, can compare lots of cities quite easily

Cons: Adverts, dated graphics and icons, text-heavy, help-link goes to browser, limited to comparing weather condition and temperature.

Conclusions

• My idea of a grid dashboard comparing multiple cities does not seem to have been done to the extent I plan. The colour-coded tiles concept is unique (to my knowledge), as is the use of a wider range of weather variables (rainfall, humidity, pressure etc. – most stick with temperature and  a weather condition icon).
• All the apps only compare live data, so there is also scope for uniqueness in showing max/min/mean data for the day, and even historical data (perhaps this could be a pay-for feature to be developed later).
• Give detailed unit options if the app is to be deployed globally.
• Provide update settings like: “Update only on Wi-fi”, “Set update frequency”, “Update manually only”.
• The most-downloaded apps have good graphics, so I need to consider making some effort in this area.
• To get good reach, it will need to be able to get data from cities around the world – no apps I looked at limit the user to one continent  (my initial idea specifies European cities only).

Specification Brainstorm

Made with https://bubbl.us/

This is a brainstorm I did when I first came up with the idea for my app. From this I will design my interview questions.

App Idea | Motivation

This post aims to cover point one of the HCI specification –

A short description of what your app does and explains the motivation behind building it, for example, what problem does it solve?

The app compares the weather in different cities using a unique colourful visual interface

My app is a city weather comparison visualisation interface. The idea is to have nine cities represented on coloured tiles in a grid arrangement. The tiles will display the city name and the value of the weather variable (e.g. temperature, atmospheric pressure) being displayed. The colour of each tile is dependent on the value, so the effect is an easy visual way of comparing the weather in different cities. The cities can be user-specified by selecting them from a map interface (making use of the GoogleMaps or Bing API). The visualisation interface, “dashboard”, will be clear and simple, and make use of graphics to give the app a modern and mobile-device-specific feel (no desktop-style text-heavy menus).

I came up with the idea because I am a weather fanatic and love to see how the weather in my home city (London) compares to other European cities that I have visited. I created a really quick testing version of the app and already I find myself viewing it several times a day simply because I think it’s interesting. I know that there many other weather freaks out there too, so that is clearly my biggest market. However, I aim to keep the design straightforward enough so that anyone can use it, and hopefully be interested in it too. This probably means not including complex weather variables such as the dew point (though perhaps a setting to add this could be included).

New App

I can now confirm that I will be developing my own app. Whether or not my client app will be continued is uncertain but should not impact on the process of developing my new app.

App change?

Due to difficulties with my client, I may have to abandon the fluid calculator app and instead develop my own idea, which is a live weather app using local, personal weather station data. This blog will be halted until I know for sure.

Tech update

So, here are some problems I had and how I solved them:

• Screen rotation messed up layout; no desire tofix for prototype. Solved by specifyng the Activity orientation as portrait in the Manifest
• pop-up keyboard not hiding on input in text field. Can force closure with InputMethodManager imm = (InputMethodManager)getSystemService(
                            Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
                      imm.hideSoftInputFromWindow(et.getWindowToken(), 0);
• Number had too many dp. Use String.format(“%.1f”, number)

Persona

Name: Dr Rock

Age: 27

Likes: technology, life shortcuts

Dr Rock is a newly qualified paediatric surgeon. He is young and ambitious and loves tech. He is tired of all the old surgeons and their old-fashioned ways. Dr Rock has a tablet and two smart phones. When visiting patients he often has to calculate their fluid maintenance. Doing this requires getting out his calculator and laboriously applying some annoying formula he had to learn in Med school. Sometimes he forgets his calc and has to run around trying to find it. He came here to SAVE LIVES, not do this!

What he needs is my app. He can install it on all his devices for free, and wherever he goes, he’ll have the app, since being a tech freak means always having one or more of his device to hand. No more remembering to bring the old-school calculator or fiddling around with the phone calculator. No more remembering some obscure formula. He saves time and stress and gets to use his tech products. The kids love seeing surgeons be so modern.