Weather app UI — a mini case study
Product design is a fascinating field as I am finding out day by day. There’s so much to explore and it never gets old. One of the best ways to explore is to build the design muscle by practicing consistently.
As part of my product design course on Dribbble, this week’s design challenge was to design a weather user interface. An app, or a widget, or a dashboard…the brief was open. My take was to design the home screen of a mobile app version.
First steps
I scribbled a few ideas of what I’d want to see on a weather app. In addition to the obvious key data, I would want to see some visual of my city and some very brief headlines to keep me informed.
After that, I dived into the internet for some inspo. There’s plenty of good ideas floating around the web space and I picked a few and created a moodboard.
With ideas and moodboard set, I proceeded to sketching and mid fidelity wire-framing for my layout. I find this phase to be the most relaxing. It’s a no fluff session, just designing without a care in the world about color, fonts, images. It’s about designing the best blueprint for your product. It can be very therapeutic exercise.
My approach and thoughts:
But you know the phase doesn’t last right? Just like Arsenal on top of the table…it won’t last more than a season Arsenal fans, stop the noise, it’s a glitch in the system…anyway no hard feelings. Back to my weather app, I moved on to the next phase: hi-fidelity design.
Hi-fidelity screen
It began with typeface selection. Which typeface combinations would work best for my brand? I was looking for something modern, sleek, easy on the eye, quick to scan at small scale. Inter, a loyal soldier of mine seemed like the obvious choice but I decided to give it a break as I did with Poppins a few months ago. After a frantic search (ok, that’s a great exaggeration), I landed on two typefaces: Big Shoulder Text for headings and Source Sans Pro for body copy.
With the typeface selection process done, I moved on to converting the wireframes to polished designs. Icons were sourced from various libraries and images from Unsplash. But first, color choices. I wanted to keep it simple with a neutral color and just highlights of color here and there. I settled for white and de-saturated bright colors for the weather icons to make info easy to digest. And finally I had a result. A screen that reflect the day’s weather, the city’s backdrop and some nice small chunks of info.
Feedback
I was very happy with the result and considering it’s meant to be a quick practice design to build skill, I think it’s a master piece (not really, but it’s a good result).
And so I shared it with my fellow peers on Slack and got some positive reviews….🥳 🥳 🥳. Feedback is great as it builds confidence and may give you a perspective you did not have before.
What next?
The next weekly challenge. Looking forward to it and to continue sharing my process. Hopefully this will inspire someone out there to start, to re-start or to keep going with their design journey. It doesn’t have to be a full blown project, start small and work your way up.
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading, feel free to share your feedback below. I would love to hear from you.
