Yext Attends UXResult Hackathon: Tackling the WeatherBug Challenge
Yext Consulting Design works together to make a weather app for mountain resorts.
This posting expresses the views and opinions of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yext and its affiliates, employees, officers, directors or representatives.
The Consulting Design team attended the inaugural UXResult Design Hackathon on December 7, 2019. We split into two groups to tackle two of the many challenges posed by the sponsor companies. My team consisted of Ashlyn, Hannah, Ming, and myself. We opted to tackle the challenge posed by Weatherbug, a software company. We were excited to work in this unfamiliar space and shoot for the prize of a small-scale weather station, which would be cool to have on the rooftop of our new Rosslyn office.
The Challenge
How might we amplify the All-Season Mountain Resorts experience by providing relevant weather information and safety alerts?
We were tasked to expand the existing WeatherBug app to better provide for users who are visiting an all-season mountain resort. The challenge asked us to design our solution within the UI and brand of the existing app, and think critically about how our design was accessible and appealing for our target audience. Lastly, our solution had to appeal to users on the mountain, while also providing lasting value, increasing long-term engagement with the app as a whole.
The Process
To begin our work, we made some decisions to narrow down our focus. We decided to focus on the winter season because it has more unique content that is valuable to the user besides the typical temperature, precipitation, etc. Data such as ground conditions and recent snowfall are relevant to anyone looking to go skiing or snowboarding. For our persona, we selected a 25 year old avid snowboarder who buys a season pass every year, making multiple trips to her local ski resort to hit the slopes.
After developing our target user, we started brainstorming what features our snowboarder would like to have in a weather app. Our persona may open the app to discover:
- What is the weather both at the lodge and at the peak of the mountain?
- What are the ground conditions at different parts of the mountain?
- Should I hit the slopes today?
- When is the next good weekend to go snowboarding?
We took these guiding questions along with the problem statements established by WeatherBug and split off to work on sketches. We came back together after a bit to review the sketches and discuss which features we would be most useful for our target user group. After selecting our feature-set, we divvied up the screens among us, using Abstract branching to work in parallel.
Our rushed collaborative process had some hiccups, and at one point we thought we had overridden some work and lost everything, but we were able to recover it after some finagling. Our file was hacked together, given the time constraint, but we were able to put together some designs that we felt communicated our ideas and (mostly) met our visual standard.
The Solution
The deadline for our presentations was 4pm, and after 5 hours of working, we had built seven mobile screens detailing the new features we had designed for the WeatherBug app.
Custom Mountain “Now” Page
To make sure that the relevant content is easy to access, we overhauled WeatherBug’s existing “Now” page to include more content in an easy-to-digest view. Whenever someone is viewing a mountain resort area, the “Now” page automatically updates to include additional widgets detailing things like snowfall, ground snow quality, and specific run ratings. This is all the information winter sport athletes need to assess the overall quality of the mountain and decide whether or not it is safe and enjoyable to head out onto the mountain.
Crowdsourced Conditions
Weather apps are a crowded market. We did some thinking about data-driven apps that found a way to differentiate themselves, and thought of Waze. Waze is, at face value, a traffic and navigation app. You open the app to get a destination in the shortest amount of time. However, through their crowdsourcing tools, they have created a community of drivers that report information such as obstacles in the road and police presence, to aid their fellow drivers using the app. We thought this idea would be a great addition to our app. The ultimate authority on the quality of a run are the athletes themselves. We designed a simple reporting system that detects when an athlete is at the end of a run and sends them a push notification that asks one question to get the quality of the run. If they weren’t happy with it, the app can use the data of other users to suggest alternate runs that they might prefer.
This feature not only collects essential data that is shared with other users, but it works to build a community of users that report their findings to aid others.
Crucial Map Data
Many winter athletes use the map of the resort to choose and navigate to the run of their choice. We wanted to leverage this opportunity to present data to the user, and overhauled WeatherBug’s map experience when viewing a mountain resort. Under the Maps tab, you are able to see various runs and lifts. While viewing the map, you have the ability to apply a layer to view various conditions across the resort, including snowfall, wind, and temperature.
Conditions Calendar
The last feature that we came up with to support winter sport athletes was a conditions calendar that allowed users to see predicted weather patterns far into the future. Using a combination of weather model data and historical data, the app presents a calendar view that communicates predicted temperature and snowfall for weeks in the future. This establishes value for the snowboarding user even when they are off of the resort. They can use this calendar to plan their future trips, ensuring they arrive on a day that best matches their preferred conditions.
The Outcome
After a flurry of last-minute tweaks and a teeny amount of practice, we presented in front of a panel of judges, and our WeatherBug expert, Natalie Mandriko, a Product Manager at WeatherBug. She was impressed with our work, especially the map integration, which said would leverage WeatherBug’s existing data to communicate with mountain-goers in a medium they are very comfortable with. Natalie decided to award the WeatherBug prize to our team, beating out 4 other teams that took on the WeatherBug challenge. We were awarded a weather station, that we will install on the rooftop of our new office building, allowing us and the rest of our office to get hyper-local weather information via the WeatherBug app.
Special thanks to Natalie Mandriko for providing valuable information throughout the course of the hackathon to aid our product development, and Vlad Korobov for organizing the UXResult hackathon, giving our team this opportunity to take on a unique challenge and have fun doing it!
