Carol Kirkwood demonstrates the app
1. Clarity and simplicity
Users of the Weather app love its simplicity. It does one thing beautifully: telling you what the weather is going to be where you are right now and over the days ahead.
The design, by our in-house designers, played to the strengths of the iconic BBC Weather symbols. It’s a slick and modern interface which makes reference to our past while retaining the look and feel of the TV brand. The team focused on the most important needs - accuracy and speed - and resisted the temptation to add unnecessary functionality.
Throughout its development, we continually tested the app with user groups who were able to give us detailed feedback on what they did and didn’t like. This included testing with partially sighted users to make sure the app was fully accessible.
Smartphone or tablet?
The app was the first in the BBC to launch simultaneously on iOS and Android. BBC Marketing and Audiences did a tremendous job at both building awareness of the app and delivering clear messages of the benefits it delivered. These ran nationally in a TV campaign in summer 2013.
But it was Carol Kirkwood on BBC Breakfast using the app and describing how it worked that gave us our highest ever number of downloads in a minute.
Key to effective ongoing promotion has been a single point of editorial accountability for Weather across all platforms. Liz Howell, head of BBC Weather, and her team have been able to ensure a consistency of promotion around their forecasts in a non-intrusive fashion, when editorially acceptable and relevant to the audience.
3. Refine, don’t smother
We change and enhance the app on a regular basis, but we’re trying not to smother or change the underlying proposition. Recent additions have been dynamically served local weather warnings, extending the forecasts to 10 days and improved social sharing.
