WeatherSA relaunches
The South African Weather Service has relaunched its weathersa.co.za website in an effort to provide users with a better experience. Unfortunately, it appears that the site has been designed to incorporate as many "features" as possible rather than fewer but better features.
For those not familiar with the old weathersa.co.za site it was a simple, clean and unpretentious affair. It told you the minimum and maximum temperatures, rainfall prediction and similar consumer-level information without needing to go beyond the front page.
It wasn’t the best looking page but it was certainly a lot better than most and more useful.
So why the Weather Service decided to fix what wasn’t really broken is not immediately apparent. But they did and the result is a website which certainly exposes a lot more of what the organisation does but it also bogs it down in flashy and unhelpful graphics (some of which, like the rollover menus, can be switched off, thankfully).
One of the benefits of the old site was that users could quickly see the minimum and maximum temperatures for major metropolitan areas. On the new site there is an interesting looking map, with some towns and some temperatures. To get to minimum and maximum temperatures users have to navigate the "pop-out" menu system down the left hand side. That in itself is pretty distracting but then users also have choose between "minimum temperature" or "maximum temperature". It may just be force of habit but most users would expect to find a list of both minimum and maximum temperatures at the same time. With the new site, however, users need to visit at least two pages to glean that much information.
It’s not that the information isn’t there, it is. Just hover over a major city name and a popup appears which links to a seven-day forecast, a 48-hour forecast, an SMS button (which doesn’t appear to work), and a tide report (yes, even for Standerton). The problem is that it’s not particularly obvious.
In actual fact the new site has a ton of good information it’s just that it hides it in non-obvious places, or in some cases the links don’t work.
And in its defense the weathersa.co.za website does greet users with a choice of viewing the old or the new site. Sadly that will probably be removed sometime soon and we’ll be left with the new site only.
WeatherSA website – give your view
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