Aviation Weather UX Design
I started taking flying lessons, which were an awesome, and incredibly stressful, experience. On the one hand, you get views like this:

On the other hand, you have to deal with technologies that were created in the 1960s, kind of brought to the internet age in the 1990s/2000s, and have remained pretty much the same since:

METAR is a weather info format that indicates wind speed and direction, visibility, cloud cover, temperature, dew point, air pressure, precipitation, and a few other things. It’s incredibly important to be able to correctly read the weather for your current airport and the airports along your flying route so you know what types of flying conditions you’ll be enjoying (read: small 4-seater plane+ strong wind gusts = not a good time).
Most of the information you need is in front of you in an unnecessarily difficult format, and it’s assumed that the many relations between these values are known to the user or must be looked up elsewhere. Important info such as the temperature and dew point ranges that are most likely to result in icing, or which runways will be used given the current wind directions.
As a brand new student pilot, I struggled with interpreting this; not just because it’s a completely incomprehensible format, but because in addition to EVERYTHING that you need to know and keep track of and react to, this is an unnecessary stress and cognitive load.
So, I decided to redesign the whole Aviation Weather experience. I’ve been creating an easy to use and interactive dashboard where you can see all the information you need immediately, and easily drill down to see relevant trends and relations.

I’ve built an early version of this, which can be found at www.projectaereo.com, so please check it out and let me know what you think in the comments below!
