Why build a new weather app? There are a ton of them out there (until now I’ve been partial to Weatherbug) so if you want to to get noticed, you need to come to market with a fresh perspective and Outside (developed by Robocat) does just that. The first thing you’ll notice is that the UI is meticulously crafted (courtesy of superstar designer Michael Flarup) in a style that remains playful without compromising credibility (after all, you want to trust that this app will properly equip you in your battle against the elements). This is apparent both in the visual design style but also with the impeccable attention to detail paid to the interaction design.
Once you start playing around, you’ll start to get a sense of their refreshing approach to communicating the weather to their users – they do it in a very human way by a) simplifying the amount of features they offer and b) focusing those features on how the weather will affect you.
Here’s a look at the instructions you get when you first fire up the app letting you know how to navigate their information. This style gives you a great sense of the overall feel of the app.
If you’re looking for detailed satellite imagery from the Doppler2000, this is not the app for you but if you want to be alerted when there’s rain on the way when then you might want to give it a spin.
Their human-centric approach manifests itself mostly in the importance they place on user-defined notifications based on certain conditions. What’s so wonderful about this is that this is the kind of stuff that you really care about 90% of the time – weather changes that will affect your behavior. Below you can see the alerts that I’ve set up for Cold (below 30 degrees) and Rain.
They allow you to set alerts based on the following conditions: Cold, Rain, UV and T-Shirt (and clearly working on others). For each one, you set the threshold at which you want to be alerted and then customize the push notification you get when it crosses that threshold. They also let you customize what the push notification will say. Here’s what I have for when we cross my cold weather threshold:
The notification system is also where their business model comes in – the initial $2.99 purchase gets you the app + 1 month of notifications and then after that you can pay $1 for 3 months of notifications. I am certain that paying for a weather app, much less subscribing to one, is going to turn a lot of people off. I’m also curious to see how the somewhat wonky payment structure plays out as it presents an interesting communication challenge.
This app might not be for everyone (i.e. hard core weather fetishists, people who expect weather info to be free) but if you want an app that delivers daily weather information via a wonderfully designed experience and interaction and offers a thoughtfully-executed notification system, I highly recommend Outside.
In addition to that, I think it’s important to recognize how they’ve approached an oversaturated market from a new angle. Are there other apps we take for granted that could be given a similar treatment?
- check out a thorough walkthough of the app on their site.
- download the app. (iTunes link)
- follow the dev team on Twitter.
