“A great blend of images and typography that makes me want to check the weather.” —Dustin Callif
“Beautiful real-time imagery in a clean interface. What’s not to love? Makes even a rainy day a little better.” —Kris Kiger
Overview: Most weather apps are filled with charts and numbers, ignoring the emotional connection people have to checking the weather in their favorite cities, where their friends and families live or where they’re traveling to next. With the Yahoo Weather app for Android (and now iPhone), Yahoo tapped into this personal perspective by including crowdsourced local photos that reflect the current weather conditions alongside the accurate weather data you need—so you can see the weather and revisit memories of your favorite places, not just read numbers and charts. The result is a stunning snapshot of the weather around the world that delivers accurate weather information and then some.
• Developed by an in-house team at Yahoo, the app is the evolution of an internal Hackday project that launched in 2011, with a major update in August 2013.
• The weather app also serves as a global art gallery showcasing thousands of local weather photos submitted by Flickr’s thriving photo community.
• Since the app’s iPhone version launched in April, daily weather users have increased by 150 percent.
Comments by Yahoo’s in-house design and development team:
What was the thinking behind the navigation structure? “Sleek typography in a simple scroll-down display offers a variety of concise weather data, such as detailed temperature predictions, precipitation, cloud data, radar maps, sun and moon times (rise and set), wind speed and more. When a user moves down the frame, the photo slowly blurs in the background, bringing the weather data into clearer focus. Users can personalize the app by tapping the right corner of the tiles to minimize or reorder the weather information to fit their needs. They can swipe to the left and right for different locations, or tilt their phone for a gallery view of the photos in full screen. It’s like a stack of postcards of all your travels: you can get lost flipping through photos of the places that matter most to you.”
Were there any specific demands that made the project easier or harder? “While we have a large pool of Flickr photos that could fit any location, such as a clear sky, a forest, a cityscape or a snowy park, our goal was to collect beautiful weather photos for morning, afternoon and night in every city in the world. To accomplish this, we created a Flickr group called Project Weather, where any user can submit their weather photos for potential inclusion in the app. We have a deep commitment to the quality of the Flickr image pool, so our team of curators takes time to carefully review each submission to find the highest quality images that specifically match the current weather conditions.”
