Weather Underground

Home Page Redesign for a Leading Weather Site

When we began working with Weather Underground, their home page was replete with information. A suite of maps displayed hundreds of data points (albeit US only). Visitors could browse weather summaries and blog posts.

The good news: visitors would often spend 10 minutes browsing the home page. The bad: they would rarely venture any further. More than 60% of new visitors to the home page left without navigating deeper into the site. They asked us to work up concepts and designs for a new home page design.

The purpose of the redesigned home page is to get visitors to their local weather as quickly as possible. Driven by this objective we proposed redesigning the home page to function primarily as a location finder. We worked up three high-level user experience concepts – from a simple search box to an interactive map of nearby weather stations.

The chosen direction was refined as a pixel-accurate page wireframe. The focal point of the new home page is a large search field with a “fast find” feature displays results as soon as you start typing. A visitors' IP address is detected and nearby cities and weather stations are displayed which link directly to that location's detailed weather page.

In addition to the location finder, the new home page has content modules that enable popular, current or promoted features to be easily added. The redesigned home page uses the new page grid and visual design language that was created as part of our ongoing work with Weather Underground.