Change to worse – Euronews Weather

Let’s begin at the bottom.

Why do I watch the weather info?

• I am interested in the weather at my location.
• I am travelling today and would like to know the weather at my destination.

What am I expecting from that service?

• Easy to find the location.
• Easy to read the information.

Why were the previous screens on Euronews Weather great?

• Display a lot of locations on each region’s screen.
• Even easy to find the location that I am interested in.
• If there is no information about the exact city I am looking for, I can check the cities around it and get an expectation.
• It clearly shows the weather and the temperature.

What is wrong with this new design? Almost everything.

What can’t I do on the new screens?

• I can’t easily find the location that I am looking for.
• I can’t easily read the information.

What can I do? I can get lost on the screen while they change to the next slide. Why?

• The screen is a solid bright area. There is no contrast. Visual accessibility is completely missing.
• City images in the background don’t help too much in finding the target city, but they add more details to the info cards and make the primary information much less readable. (Yes, some cities have well-known landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower for Paris. But on the screen above, the image of Berlin, Bruxelles or Warszawa can be any other city worldwide, mainly if you have yet to see it or can’t easily recognise it in the 5-7 seconds while it is on the screen.)
• Another thing about the city images: it is confusing that the weather on the picture doesn’t follow the weather info on the card. That can cause more challenging recognition of the information.
• The weather symbol can be disturbed by the background, like on Bruxelles one, where the rain part is almost invisible. Also, it can look like a part of that image, like on the Lisboa card.
• The other important information, the temperature, is completely hidden on most cards. No comment.
• After a long time, I recognised that the gradient background behind the city name tries to illustrate the temperature—just another overlapping detail. The tone changes in colour are pretty small. I’m not sure if all viewers can recognise its purpose. On the other hand, we associate two colours with the temperature. Red and blue. Full stop. No other colour we generally use for any sign of heat. They are using yellow and green too. What does that mean? I would better associate yellow with a sunny day and green for the spring or summer. But I can’t connect these two colours with any temperature.
• Finally, the city names are the only ones that complete the readability. But only partially. They are not consistently using the native and English names of the cities.

It is entirely the opposite of the previous version:

• Displays only 9 locations on each region’s screen.
• Hard to find the location that I am interested in.
• If there is no information about the exact city I am looking for, I can’t have the info that I am looking for.
• Hard to read and recognise the weather and the temperature.

It would be great not to change to this weak solution. But if Euronews has a strong case for why they did that, they can do that much better if they ask their audience or look to the new screen with more attention from the viewer’s side.

UX/UI design is not about creating something nice and artistic. It is about how to service the user better. Unfortunately, in this particular case, the new version lost all the benefits the previous one had and didn’t give anything useful. So, it’s not better but worse.

Supposing there is a fundamental purpose for the new layout and reduced content, I made a version which follows the new layout content but focuses on information and makes it clear: