20 July 2013

Art & Logic Blog: “The New UI Design Playground”

Many designers and developers of mobile apps have since turned their attention to weather apps. App stores are overflowing with different takes on answering the timeless question of “what’s the weather like today?” and just as with Twitter clients, you can easily hop between them either simply by entering your ZIP code or letting the app use your current location. Steven Huey

True, I have seen a lot of innovative design in weather apps – and I even reviewed a couple here on the blog. The problem is… most of them put design experiments ahead of everything else in the app: user experience, performance, available data. Solar for example displays forecasts for only three days; Yahoo! can’t find many smaller cities in Romania and I found it rather inaccurate; Forecast and Sun are beautiful web-apps, but as such lack reliability – I refuse to use an app that requires you to reinstall it every other week. I have tried many and sooner or later I always come back to Celsius, which despite boring design is functional, has accurate forecasts and an extensive city database. Hip design isn’t everything; you have to look at the entire user experience to create a quality product, one that people will be loyal to. Otherwise they will move to another app as soon as the new trend in design comes along.

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