Who are Storm Radar's primary users?

• Predominantly male, ages 55+
• Weather-dependent professionals, who check the weather to support day-to-day functions of their job.
• Key user professions include construction, transportation, aviation, agriculture, education, police and fire departments.
• A desire to access more in-depth, technical weather data.

High Level Business Goals

• Increase premium subscription opt-ins within the existing user base.
  → Metric: Grow another 500k to 1 million subscribers by hyper-serving advanced radar tools, as well as cross-promoting with The Weather Channel platforms.  
• Acquire a new audience of users with high-impact radar moments.
  → Metric: Increase DAUs by 15%
• Improve user satisfaction and retention.
  → Metric: Maintain 80% subscription retention.

"Research studies indicated that users want a weather radar-centric experience that simply focuses on improving accuracy, forecasting, and detail rather than new 'mass-market' appealing features. Users showed the most interest in advanced precipitation and severe weather tracking whereas features surrounding editorial, health & wellness ranked lowest."

14% of ad-supported users expressed high interest in purchasing a Premium subscription if new features were added.

To achieve the goal of increasing subscriptions, the beta would first be available to Premium subscribers only.
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Limiting the beta to paid users ensured feedback came from our most engaged audience.

Home Screen Radar
For the main radar screen, I introduced a dark blue top navigation bar to clearly signal that users were in the beta experience. I also added a timeline scrubber, allowing users to animate the map and view forecasted weather.

Watches & Warnings
This advanced map allowed users to filter watches, warnings and other alerts from government sources including the National Weather Service. Users could filter by region, alert type, and severe weather.

When selected, the map uses a color coded system to display active alerts. Users could tap a highlighted area to pull up a sheet that showed all of the active alerts for that location. If there were multiple alerts, the user could easily shuffle through the descriptions to quickly scan for important details.

Accumulations
This map displayed accumulated rain and snowfall, for up to 72 hours in the past and future. Users could press and drag their finger around the map, as the precise accumulation type displayed data for the area within the crosshair.

There were a handful of usability factors to consider when designing this map. I knew we needed to provide users with a legend that was collapsible for quick references. Another challenge included the consideration of how the map interface would change when users set it to display observed versus forecasted data.

Observed data shows past accumulation amounts, and adding a timeframe carousel allowed users to easily switch between previous periods.

Forecasted data displays future accumulation amounts, and instead of a timeframe carousel, users could scrub the timeline to see predicted amounts of precipitation.

Storm View
This distinctive feature let users view storm cell data in real time through a split-screen map layout.

The View Finder map gave a real-time visualization of the user's area. The Tactical map showed a top-down view of storm cells within a 150-mile radius.

We introduced several new controls and icons for this feature, so we added an optional product walkthrough and an FAQ section to help users get oriented.