Designing an ambitious new app and digital language for Met Office
As part of a long-term Digital Channel Partnership with the Met Office, GAIN helped define a new creative strategy for its consumer channels, extending and rebuilding its existing weather app, replacing its desktop and mobile websites with a single responsive platform, and providing GDS consultancy end-to-end, from Discovery through to live Beta.
Stats
41.48% increase of new users
41.48%
9 million App downloads
9mil
6.5% increase in organic search acquisition
6.5%
The challenge
The Met Office needed its digital presence to work as hard as its forecasts. Its existing app and separate desktop and mobile websites lacked a consistent design language, and with weather affecting virtually everyone, the challenge wasn’t designing for a niche audience, it was designing for almost everybody, from casual users checking tomorrow’s rain to enthusiasts who wanted to dig into raw weather data. Layered on top of that was a need to embed accessibility properly, at a time when WCAG hadn’t yet published guidelines for native apps.
The strategy
GAIN began with a technical Discovery covering code reviews, integration checks and UX testing, and quickly mobilised a multidisciplinary team of UX designers, iOS and Android developers, scrum managers, QA testers and ITIL service management. Rather than rebuilding from scratch, the team optimised the existing native app architecture, improving in-app navigation and surfacing relevant information through native components, saving time and cost while leaving room for future growth.
When planned in-person guerrilla testing wasn’t possible, the team pivoted to live Beta and Alpha versions on Android and Apple, gathering feedback through surveys that drew more than 40,000 sign-ups in a week. Ongoing surveys and behaviour-based personas, designed around how people actually interact with weather information rather than demographics, fed a journey map that turned real pain points into user stories, shaping the entire development backlog.
Enthusiast users wanted deeper access to weather data, so GAIN designed and tested a global weather data map tool, combining design with code functionality and live data APIs to hit an MVP deadline. Accessibility was embedded throughout via dedicated consultants in every sprint team, with GAIN’s Director of Accessibility, a WCAG chair, writing bespoke native app accessibility guidance still used by the Met Office today. Finally, GAIN developed a component-based digital design language, tailored to each platform’s interface guidelines, giving the Met Office a scalable framework across its entire consumer portfolio.
The results
The redesign delivered a 41.48% increase in new users, 9 million app downloads, and a 6.5% increase in organic search acquisition. The Met Office Weather Forecast app went on to win two awards at the World Meteorological Organisation’s International Weather App Awards 2020, for public weather forecasts and information, and for weather warnings.
Beyond the numbers, the new push notification strategy, built on API blueprinting and a bespoke algorithm pairing weather icons with short, human copy, turned passive weather alerts into genuinely useful, personalised updates, including targeted health messaging for users affected by UV, pollen and pollution. The new design language freed the Met Office’s team to focus on innovation rather than reinventing components from scratch each time.
Client Testimonial
You should all be very proud of the work you have done. I want to use you as an example to other Government departments.
GDS Assessor