Breakin’ it down
As you may see in the screenshot to the left, when you take a look at the main display, the first thing you may notice is the complex display, I say “complex” without a negative connotation, it’s a beautifully designed display and I have no complaints regarding that.
Upon opening the app, you may already notice that the main interface affords the act of scrolling in all different directions– ↑ ↓ → ←, when you scroll left or right, you are presented with the other cities and their weather conditions, these are the cities that you’ve previously looked up and have added in your list of places. When you scroll upwards, you refresh the page and the information gets updated, when you scroll down, more weather information in your current location is provided.
After searching for the page for adding cities and new weather information by scrolling, I then noticed the little symbols towards the top of the page. Those of course, stood out as buttons to me, but none of the symbols called out “adding a new location” to me. But because I didn’t find the page I was looking for, I pressed through the buttons to find the page anyway.
The left most symbol resembled a radar logo, opening it up, it is the rain map, which you can also customize in your settings for what you would like to display– either clouds, satellite, or the simple rain map that I have at the moment. This animated weather radar helps you quickly see what weather is coming your way. This is straightforward and easy to access for those who like to look at weather this way. The buttons to the top right corner, both very common logos– “settings”, and “information”, are straightforward as well, I thought I would be able to find adding a new location in the settings tab as that was where you got to customize your display, but I couldn’t find it there. And the information button only advertises apps from the same developers.
After pressing around the main frame, including the weather information panels because they’re the same color as the buttons in the top panel, I find out/ remember that to get to the page of adding new weather in a new city, you have to click on the text of the city’s name itself. This is completely hidden in affordance because like I said earlier on, the actual weather information is also white and has the exact same font as the text for the location, I could barely tell that that’s what I was supposed to press.
There is a tiny downward-point arrow to the left of the location text but that didn’t trigger anything in my mind, I only understood that after finding out that was where I had to press.
After pressing the location text, you’re taken to a page that appears as a list of cities titled “Places” and their temperatures. You’re also provided a small symbol on the left of every city or town name that represents the weather condition. This page is much easier to understand but should be easier to have access to.
I confirmed this as an issue by letting some fellow peers try out the app on their own without guidance (most people were not familiar with using the app and usually use and are satisfied with the preinstalled iOS Weather app), I didn’t tell them what function I had a problem with, but I noticed, based on observing how they interact with the app, that they never thought of or get close to pressing the location text tab to change the location, they do tap the buttons with symbols and also try tapping around in the pretty display underneath instead. Then when I revealed my main focus, their reactions were mostly “Oh, I didn’t even notice that”, “It didn’t look like a button”, “The text is too small compared to Weather iOS app” and so on.
In addition to how difficult finding this specific “Places” page was, when you tap the addition symbol top left corner of the “places” page, it takes you to a search window where you can search the city of your liking. Once you’ve typed in the city and taken back to the original “Places” page, there’s no “return to previous page” button for you to return to the main display, what you have to do is press on the location again to see the weather details. This is also hard to determine intuitively and I was only able to understand this through trial and error. What I aim to “reconstruct” in the redesign is to make the “Places” page easier to find, as well as small adjustments on the page itself. In the next journal entry I will be analyzing the app’s UI design patterns.
Below is a deconstruction of the app which is a representation of the app with annotations of patterns and functions.
Journal with me! 
[…] I will break the app down further in terms of what specific issues I’m experimenting with finding the “Places” page in the next journal entry, you can read it here. […]
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