What’s the Weather Doing?

As a self-confessed geek, I am always looking for new ways to get the information I want when I want it, preferably without having to do anything (geeks, as a people, are inherently lazy). But as a geek with a sense of design pride, I also want my information to look pretty.

Enter Yahoo! Widgets, a nifty application that mimics the functionality of MacOS X’s Dashboard to provide an infinitely customisable suite of widgets, some of which are very shiny indeed. On my desktop at home, for example, I have a widget to tell me when I have new email (because I need to know now), a graphical display of the strength of my WiFi connection, an alarm clock that wakes me up with my favourite MP3s through iTunes (so I can avoid having to listen to the radio), and a Weather widget, which looked like this on Monday afternoon:

Notice anything odd? The temperature, at about 3pm on Monday, was… well, actually, I’m not entirely sure. The large numbers in the top right, which are supposed to represent the current temperature, tell me 30º; but then, in the top left of the "long range forecast", the maximum temperature for today is only 22º. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s another box telling me that the temperature on Monday will be 19º.

Which is it?

The root of the problem, I bet, is that I’m living in a weird timezone: in New Zealand right now, the timezone is UTC+1300, which means we’re most of a day ahead of Yahoo!’s weather server in (quick check) Sunnyvale, California. So it’s conceivable that the widget really believed it was Sunday when I asked. But why? I already told the widget where I am (there’s a setting for your city, which of course it needs to be able to forecast your weather); why couldn’t it use that information to look up my timezone? At the very least, the configuration dialogue could have given me the option of choosing my timezone from a list.

Imagine if this had been something important, like specifying a priority delivery where the difference between "tomorrow" and "the day after tomorrow" could be a five-figure contract. Maybe that’s a little extreme; or is it? The extra effort needed to make a simple check like that is always worth it, because no matter how pretty your software is, it’s useless if the information it provides only confuses your customers.

One simple question could have avoided a whole lot of confusion —- and, of course, the need for me to actually step outside to see if it really was 30 degrees.

(It was.)