Search Weather
Weather is the #3 searched most term on Google in the US and a high-volume search query globally. It is one of the few topics that affects every person on the planet every day, significantly influencing daily routines and decisions from choosing clothing to planning outdoor activities or travel. It impacts safety, agriculture, the economy, and even small talk. Due to its broad reach and importance to users, it is crucial for Search to provide a comprehensive, useful and engaging weather information experience.
Modernizing the weather experience
By 2021, investment in weather on Search had been on pause for several years and the experience was becoming highly fragmented and outdated, lagging behind the rest of the Search experience and market standards. A new Search Weather team was formed, with the goal of reinventing weather on Search as a consistent and modern experience and bringing Google's unique value and technology to the domain.
To help the team generate a north star vision for Search Weather, I co-led and facilitated an intensive cross-functional design sprint, with teams across Google participating. The sprint resulted in a new strategic vision and a multi-year roadmap which we presented to Search leadership and obtained executive buy-in.
I synthesized learnings and hypotheses from existing research and past design efforts and designed an entirely new UI for Search Weather, including coming up with patterns and interactions that were completely new to Search. I created prototypes which we tested in several rounds of usability studies and evaluations, garnering highly positive feedback from users. We then conducted a limited experiment on the new experience, which despite the promising UXR performed very negatively. After analyzing the results, we hypothesized that this was an important lesson in change aversion - after many years of seeing a consistent Weather experience without any changes, the sudden dramatic switch to a new UI without any warning caused whiplash for users and made it hard for them to adjust.
Based on these learnings, the team decided to take an evolutionary approach rather than a radical one. With a brilliant new designer onboarding to the team, he redesigned the UI to be more closely aligned with the legacy experience while introducing new concepts gradually and incrementally. This would help ease users into the change and get used to a more frequent change cadence. This approach proved to be successful when after testing a UI that better resembled the existing experience for a longer period of time, the metrics stabilized enough to fully launch and over time even turned into a significant increase in user engagement, satisfaction and growth.
Read more:
Android Police: Google’s mobile weather forecast just got its first redesign in 7 years