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Weather Underground redesign

wunderground.com

32 pointsqcassidy21 comments

Out of all the weather sites, I still prefer the layout of the National Weather Service's forecast pages.

Example: http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=41.893077299131...

Do you think any A/B testing or science went into the new design? Was this design chosen because it was cool, or because it optimized advertising click-throughs?

I ask because I too find myself returning to NOAA (especially their 2-day graph gasp Java applet) as a definitive (if not deeply hidden) best source for weather info, and I lament the horrific local TV station weather user experiences are foisting on people. Attention TV meteorologists: many of you have a big enough following and brand to form and monetize your own sites (TV contract-permitting).

NWS -- according to rumor -- deliberately keeps their pages nerdy and undesigned due to pressure from commercial providers (AccuWeather, etc.), which don't want a government-supported a "rival". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_Duties...) Forget that the government rival was there first. It's been awkward to get XML-ish data feeds from NWS, because private industry is trying to make money selling the same data which is freely available from NWS.

The private weather services don't provide much value. Most of the local current conditions data (METAR) is gov't sponsored, not to mention the satellite imagery. The government forecast algorithms are just great -- the gov't has a mandate to do this & does it well. It does make sense to go to a private provider if you have an oil rigs, agribusiness, etc. which needs tailored weather advisories.

The only place for good local weather which isn't cribbing or catching up with NWS is local meteorologists in difficult to judge regions. For example in the hill country of northern Vermont, the Eye on the Sky forecasters will call the weather valley by valley, a luxury which NWS computers won't give.

The redesign is visually pleasing, but it's no longer usable. I now have to scroll down to see the 5-day forecast. I switched my bookmark over to http://www.wund.com, the lite version.

On the main page, I thought it was nifty that it autodetected my location and gave the current weather, but then I couldn't find any link to actually find the forecast!

Then I thought to click on the name of the town. That gave me a page of which less than 1/3 was actual content (until I scrolled down). This seems like exceedingly poor design. Although, the actual "Forecast" div is reasonably compact, so there might be some URL hack you can do to jump straight to that.

It's too bad; I was a wunderground user for years until they did a site upgrade that kept causing browser crashes; I've been on weather.com for quite a while now, and this upgrade doesn't look good enough to entice me back.

I prefer Weather Underground, because their predictions are a bit more pessimistic than weather.com's, I would rather be prepared for a snow or rain that didn't happen than be caught unprepared by one that did.

"wund" has at least one defect in common with the main site's redesign: it requires clicking around to read the details of the 5-day forecast.

There is probably someone, or a group of someones, at WU who think they have improved things.

(edit: typo)

Is it just me, or is their choice of name a terrible branding decision?

It's bothered me for quite a while. I'm surprised they haven't been lampooned on Fox News as being a terrorist weather outlet.

Wikipedia (I'm not certain if this is for real or not): Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, it was founded in 1995 as an offshoot of the University of Michigan's Internet weather database. The name is a reference to the 1960s militant radical terrorist student group the Weather Underground, which also originated at the University of Michigan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground_(weather_se...

http://www.wunderground.com/about/background.asp

>The growing Internet weather program was given the name Weather Underground, a reference to the 1960's radical group that also originated at the University of Michigan, which had taken its name from the lyrics to Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, "You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows."

My mother literally thought the weather site was somehow associated to the radical leftist organization.

Its not just you. Weirds me out, too. Maybe its only those of us old enough to remember the original, in which case we might be the wrong demographic.

I'm feeling a whitespace backlash building within me. Perhaps as a natural evolution to "below the fold" making its way into web design, I'm starting to think poorly of websites that place their content low in the viewport. WU's redesign puts the top of the content about halfway down the viewport, but the entire header, including the nav tabs, could be half as tall if they tried; I doubt anybody is typing sentences into their massive search box.

Yeah, the level of WU branding and website administrative stuff at the top even after the first visit is annoying.

Hopefully they will keep working on it. Their mobile webapp is very good at not wasting my time.

forget the redesign, give us an api that works!

http://api.wunderground.com/auto/wui/geo/ForecastXML/index.x...

Slow to load here. I waited 5 sec and gave up. Slowness is unlikely to be at my end because google loads as fast as ever.

I don't think google is the best benchmark for page speed. Try espn or cnn.com

I'm on dialup, so the difference is even more noticeable to me. The new page takes more than half again as long to load as the earlier version, and it was already pretty slow (too many ads and images).

I spent 1 minute trying to figure out how to set the units to metric system and I failed. This should be easier.

That logo...

Don't like that Wunderground turned into an unusable Weather Channel knockoff?

http://classic.wunderground.com (Classic)

http://wund.com (Lite)

http://m.wund.com (Super lite, aka Mobile) (Loads REALLY quickly)

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