New release of Local Haze app for iPhone now includes searching by sensor location and mapping UI improvements
By: Karen Donoghue
Responding to user feedback, Local Haze has a new search by location feature to improve the app’s user experience and make it easier to locate air quality (AQ) sensors. In addition, the scalability of the map view has been improved with sensor site clustering.
With this new release, Local Haze continues to help air quality enthusiasts be more confident about their local outdoor air quality readings by improving the quality of sensor accuracy through crowdsourcing.
With release 1.1.0, now when you swipe down from the top of the main Sensors screen you’ll see the new search UI. Enter a specific sensor’s name, location or a zip code to see sensors for that specific area. After search input has been entered, auto recommendations for sensors appear in a list. Tap on a sensor in the list to see the details about that sensor’s air quality data.
With the Local Haze app, you can quickly find specific locations to check the air quality and confidence ratings or you can browse a world map to look for sensors by geographic region.
In this release, the mapping interaction for Local Haze includes several improvements around map scaling and visualizations of large numbers of AQ sensor sites. Now when there are numerous sensors in a geographic region, the user sees an aggregated visual “pie chart” of colors representing clustered sensors’ air quality readings for that area.
About Local Haze
Local Haze crowdsources and analyzes readings from a variety of outdoor air quality sensors to help users understand the air quality of the world around them. Local Haze reads AQ data from sensors from PurpleAir, AirNow, and the U.S. Department of State. Local Haze is available for free on the Apple App Store (for iPhone) and can be installed here.
Our goal is to deliver the best possible air quality confidence ratings for people using Local Haze. We are continuing to improve the search experience and the analytics around AQ sensor data to help people understand the air quality readings for the locations and gain a sense of confidence about the accuracy about their AQ sensor readings.
The Local Haze team hopes you find this new search UI and mapping enhancements useful and we welcome all feedback at localhaze@humanlogic.com. Follow updates for Local Haze on Twitter at @localhaze.
Karen Donoghue is PM and Designer for Local Haze where she works on product features and UX collaborating with a team that includes design and engineering. For more info see https://www.humanlogic.com/localhaze/ and you can download Local Haze for free by visiting the Apple App Store here.
