Location labels on maps can be turned off to expose detailed weather patterns

The BBC Weather website was recently relaunched after a public beta. Senior Designer Mel Seyer has explained the UX journey and Jeremy Tarling has described some elements of the new technical architecture.

Last week I blogged about how we added colour to some of the temperatures on the site.

I'm pleased to say that we have been able to make one more change in time for Christmas: users can now turn the map labels off should they want to have a clearer view of the weather patterns. This certainly helps when looking at the whole country, where more information is shown in a smaller space and the labels can get in the way.

Amongst other work, we will continue to make ongoing improvements covering features like maps and saving favourite locations. We also begin work on a new mobile site in the New Year, so there is more to come on that.

Peter Deslandes is Head of Product, BBC Weather

Colours added to temperatures on the new BBC Weather site

A few weeks ago my colleague Liz Howell talked about how we came to launch the new BBC Weather site.

Since it went live we have been continuing to read and digest user feedback. One of the biggest requests has been to restore the temperature colours in the forecast, so we made a change earlier this week to add colour to some of the temperatures along similar lines to the old site.

This actually seems to address two separate issues: some users have told us they don't so much read the temperature numbers as absorb the colour, while others have mentioned how nice it is to just have some more colour on the page.

Looking ahead, many users have commented on how the place names on the maps obscure too much of the weather graphics and how it would be good to be able to turn them off. We are working on that feature now.

Following that, we are working on the priority of various other changes including improvements to saving locations, making the maps load more smoothly and introducing a proper interactive map. The maps work in particular is technically challenging but we continue to listen to what is important to our users and will continue to deliver the improvements that we are being asked for.

Peter Deslandes is Head of Product, BBC Weather

The new BBC Weather site shows prevailing weather clear skies behind a ferris wheel. The site will eventually reflect the weather being viewed on the page.

I’m Peter Deslandes, Head of the BBC Weather product within BBC Future Media. Just over a week ago we launched the new BBC Weather website in beta mode, a work-in-progress version which will eventually replace the current site – my editorial counterpart Liz Howell introduced this over on the BBC News Editors blog. Today I wanted to expand on how we approached the beta, tell you a bit about how audiences have responded, and provide a view of future plans too.

Since the last redesign we’ve been in constant dialogue with users about what works and what doesn’t work for them. 

Our constant challenge is delivering the varying levels of detail demanded by the broad audience we serve. Most users say that they ‘just want the weather’. Some use the site to inform short-term decisions like whether to take a coat to work or not. We see seasonal uplifts in traffic driven by this sort of behaviour during periods of heavy snow, or the summer months when temperatures are generally higher.

Other members of this user category tell us that they look at the week ahead via the five-day forecast each Sunday evening, and check the detail for the day ahead each morning.

A separate, smaller group of users like to delve deeper into the meteorology and build a more detailed picture of the weather.

They’re interested in more esoteric factors like observations (radar and satellite maps) and pressure charts, and tend to visit the site more regularly – the percentage of these users who visit us on a daily basis is twice that of ‘just give me the weather’ users.

Of course the notion of detail is subjective and varies by person, but clearly we serve mixed audience.

So, the challenge we set ourselves when redesigning the BBC Weather product was to strike a balance between simplicity and detail.

The new BBC Weather site homepage speaks to this approach: we’ve introduced an infographic map to provide a snapshot of UK weather, plus a quick link through to the full-colour UK map with five-day timeline.

Find a Forecast is still there to take you through to the locations you are interested in, and you can still save a number of favourites to make it is even easier to get to them.

Liz summarized the other new BBC Weather beta site benefits in her blog of October 27th: do check these out.

The new BBC weather site offers both a simple infographic map and a complex countoured one.

Better integration with BBC Online

The redesign also provided the opportunity to recreate the site using the new building blocks of BBC Online. 

In January this year the BBC announced that it was reshaping BBC Online around ten distinctive products, each built on the same infrastructure to enable a seamless transition across the BBC family of websites. 

The BBC Weather product now sits on the same platform as the BBC’s recently rejuvenated sites. 

The redesign also provided the opportunity to align the new site with the BBC’s evolving Global Experience Language for BBC Online to introduce visual similarities too – one of my colleagues will publish a post in the near future about the design aspects, including the reintroduction of the iconic BBC Weather symbols.

Initial responses

Throughout pre-launch user testing we reviewed each piece of feedback and made corresponding changes to the site if we felt the experience could be improved.  Commenter dotconnect  pointed to the reintroduction of actual temperatures on maps based on feedback, underneath Liz’s post of October 27th.  This public beta period gives you the same opportunity to let us know your thoughts, which you can do by commenting under this blog, contributing to discussion under the #bbcweather hashtag on Twitter, or via our survey.

Feedback from week one of the public beta has been hugely pleasing.  We’ve had around 40,000 users engaging with the product per day since launch and we’ve had over 3,500 survey responses, plus around 650 emails. 

Although it’s sadly not possible to respond to many, I am reading each one and take every piece of feedback very seriously. 

Overall, most people prefer the new site: they like the look and feel, find it clearer and easier to use with more information available at a glance.  We have also had lots of constructive feedback pointing out areas for improvement and plan to focus on the most common themes first, for instance the preference for displaying temperatures with colour. 

In response to other feedback map colours are being looked at as part of a longer-term project. 

Wind information on maps which many people are calling for is also in the pipeline. 

As a broader update to BBC Online we plan to roll out non-Flash video in areas so this should be coming to the BBC Weather product soon. 

There’s more going on than I can cover here, so apologies if your particular issue isn’t highlighted – as I said, we read everything and take it all on board.

What next?

Aside from working through user feedback, we have a future roadmap of activity including making country guides available on country pages, which will be searchable from the Find a Forecast box.

We’re also working with the Met Office on much more detailed weather warnings that will be visible on affected areas’ forecast pages. 

Lastly, the move to a new technical platform will make it easier to repurpose the refreshed BBC Weather product in time beyond the web, in line with the BBC’s four screen strategy for its ten digital products. 

Clearly an optimized BBC Weather mobile proposition will be important to deliver an on-the-move look-up experience for users.

Peter Deslandes, Head of BBC Weather Product, BBC Future Media