Atmos Weather App
app design • quartz composer • UI
Atmos is a weather app for film location scout to look for certain weathers for movie scenes.
This is a one-week project about making a weather app for a specific profession that depends on weather. I picked “Film location scout” as my profession and researched about what they need and what the opportunities are. The basic requirement includes searching for locations, add/remove locations, and looking for future weather. For this project, I used InVision to animate the transition and uploaded into my phone as a mock-up prototype.
User Research
A Location Scout is hired to do the preliminary research of different locations. They document and photograph location potential. Often the Location person begins work at pre-production and will document local weather and lighting conditions indoor and or outdoors at the specific locations. It’s a vital process in the pre-production stage of filmmaking and commercial photography.
“When a film crew shoots in the Bay Area, they usually hire a location scout to find locations, negotiate access to them and work as a liaison between the crew and the community.”
Opportunity Areas
Location scouts need to search for specific weather condition for certain scenes, ex: foggy, rainy, cloudy, sunny, lightening, snowy…, so developing a weather searching app would be a good opportunity. I want to focus on weather search, and potentially create a location scout network to get instant notice about weathers in different areas. Different features could be implemented, including weather searching, find locations, save locations, scheduling, location scout network, connecting to people, and sharing location pictures, etc.
Initial Sketches
First, I was exploring different ways to navigate between current weather, weekly forecast, and hourly forecast, and playing with the presentation of the information. Adding and deleting locations is also an important feature to explore. Since I focused on “Weather search”, I was looking into what makes sense for people to choose weather types. I categorized some basic weather types but potentially there should be more details for each type and easier ways to find the one you need.
Visual Exploration
I tested with different visual styles for the wireframes, one was using blurred image as background with minimal icons and simple navigations, the other one was more “flat design”, using color scene and clear icons to show different weathers. Talking to several people who are interested in photography, they were more intrigued by the blurred image background one, so I decided to carry on this visual to develop my final screens.
My final concept is called "Atmos". For film location scout, they need to quickly access to the near future information, so I implemented the hourly forecast and weekly forecast. I also designed a “weather search” function for user to search for the type of weather they need. It will show when and where are the good choices for them. With some photos of the location, location scouts can quickly get an idea of what the place looks like. Ideally Atmos could be integrated with film location scout communities to provide useful information about different locations for users.
