Ha. We are the ones who built Weather Notifier. I’ll be the first one to call my baby ugly. Let’s put some lipstick on this pig shall we?
Video
There’s no video explaining the benefit, only a slider with screen shots. Fail.
The ideal video, at least in my mind, would be a quick 15 second spot of someone just waking up in their down-covered bed, sun shining in brightly, turning off Airplane mode on their iPhone, then seeing an alert pop up showing it’s 50 degrees with a chance of rain, all in the new iOS 5 notification center. The person would then crawl out of bed, throw on a sweater and jacket, grab an umbrella and head out the door.
Website
We sort of bury the lead on the bottom left side and instead focus on features. Fail.
Tell me what the benefit is, the problem I’m facing, and show me how the app solves it, in a concise, visual way.
Interface
We tried to keep it to two settings screens to keep things simplistic, but watching people use it showed us that people kept trying to hit “Save” in the upper right corner after selecting each setting. Fail.
A simple fix would be to have a row for each setting taking them to a different page, then at the very bottom, a big ole Save button.
For example, I click the location setting, it takes me to a new page, I type in 11201 for the zip code, select Brooklyn NY, click Save or Back and it takes me back to the main settings screen where I then pick the next setting (e.g., time). When I’m done, I click the big save button at the bottom and are affirmed of my settings via the main screen with my various alerts.
Features
Who cares about adding features like severe weather alerts, detailed weather forecasts in the app, and sounds when you don’t even get the other stuff right?
So Why Don’t You Fix It
I’m sure you skipped through the paragraphs above just to get to this part. The reason we haven’t is very simple.
We used Weather Notifier as a case study to test a simple idea. That being the concept of Invisible Software. And we proved, at least to ourselves, that people love it. Why? Because we’re all lazy.
I believe you don’t have to put ideas you want to test into your main app or piece of software. Build something else and test it there before rolling it out to millions of users (Kiss Metrics does a good job of this). And when in doubt, remove features until your users scream (37 signals knows what I’m talking about). It takes balls, but you’re the boss. Do something crazy.
