Helping millions find the
weather features they need

Start with how people actually use weather

Before redesigning anything structural, I ran a series of deep, open-ended interviews across ages, life stages and geographies — exploratory research that reveals how people really behave, not what they think they should say. No rigid script: a warm-up, then concrete, experience-based questions to get past polished answers to real behaviour. I used AI to help synthesise the transcripts — clustering recurring patterns and surfacing themes faster — then validated every finding myself.

The core insight: people don't want weather for its own sake — they want it to plan. Two scenarios dominate — a frequent daily check, and an occasional, more deliberate one for a weekend or trip. Everything else (wind, humidity) is secondary: available, but never in the way.

A home screen that plans with you

The redesigned home leads with current and today's weather — high/low and feels-like temperature. Feels-like matters more than it looks: one father dressing his three-year-old was reading wind and humidity himself to decide on mittens; feels-like folds all of that into a single perceived temperature, so nobody has to hunt. Alongside it, a plain-language description that's warm and anticipatory — "colder by noon, grab a layer" — caring, never pushy (no directive pressure), and refreshed through the day as conditions change. The friendly text is generated with AI, in the user's context.

Glanceable cards that double as feature entry points

Under the main weather sit small info cards — rain and warnings — readable without reading: the rain card glows blue when rain is coming and stays calm when it isn't; the warnings card shows a warning color or stays green for all-clear. They're tappable and open the right product — rain into the radar, warnings into the warnings map. Seasonal, contextual cards join when relevant — a UV-index card showing the current level with a plain label, a pollen card flagging an elevated count — always unobtrusive. Each one serves the user's goal and quietly drives discovery of a feature at the same time.

Helping people find the right feature at the right moment

Rather than one overwhelming feature dump, I designed a reusable section — "Heute relevant in [city]" (with a new badge, because "Features" means nothing to a user) — that leads with three large promoted tiles (seasonal and contextual) above the full grid of all ~30 features, which fades after the first row behind a "show all" control, plus feature search on mobile. Promoted features also remain in the full list, and positions never shift — so people can always re-find what they saw (a principle I share with our CPO). Beyond that, bigger feed-style feature cards can be dropped onto any page where they're contextually relevant, so promotion follows relevance instead of living in one fixed spot — and in the new concept, people can customize which features they see (some, like warnings, stay fixed).

Customization — the comparison list stays calm by default; tap + to pull any parameter (wind, sun hours…) inline across every day. Quick to compare without overloading — exactly the occasional trip-planning scenario.

Default · clean list

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Tap + to add a widget

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Added · compare inline

App icon, re-crafted for a new era

The icon was a flat raster image — a gradient sun with rays. I rebuilt it fully in vector and, when iOS introduced Liquid Glass icons, remade it as layers in Apple's Icon Composer (and did the same for Android), handing the file to engineering. The mark has no single glyph — a rayed sun behind clouds, full of gradients — yet it had to hold up across every new mode: clear glass, tinted (any single user colour), colourless, and Dark Mode. Dark mode was the hardest — a sun and clouds read oddly at night — so after many iterations I moved it into sunset tones that keep the brand instantly recognisable. Modern, still unmistakable, and with no drop in App Store performance.

BeforeFlat raster · fixed gradients

AfterRebuilt in vector · layered

Hover to expand the stack

1. Front cloud
2. Middle cloud
3. Back cloud
4. Sun
5. Rays
6. Background