Sprint 6

Research goals from sprint 5

The research was conducted with a mix of participants, including those with low digital skills.

We focussed on testing our changes to the forecast, including:

Today, Tomorrow and Outlook tabs
only displaying the health advice for the highest reading
Daily Air Quality Index (DAQI) without numbers
the changed position of the pollutant summaries and click-through links

We also tested how the tabulated monitoring stations were viewed and understood.

Research findings

What worked well

After an interesting round of user research, we found that participants:

were clear on the forecast
interacted with the measurements section
are broadly understanding the prototype messaging
are connecting the health information to the people most at risk of poor air

What needs work

While the design tested well, we found that the:

participants did not engage with the descriptive text and still required context on the DAQI scale
‘Outlook’ was seen as ‘Day 3’ rather than the remaining few days
long term heath information is not being seen or registered
tooltips are still being passed over

What we focused on in sprint 6

As a team, we agreed the main points to focus on were:

adding a scale to indicate the full extent of the DAQI
removing the 5 day forecast from the tabs and having a static table containing the 4 day forecast
putting the UK forecast into the tab component

Adding a scale to today’s forecast

In previous sprints, we have removed the DAQI scale. However, the users wanted more context for the forecast, specifically how far the scale went up. In sprint 5 we added some text to explain the DAQI scale and levels, but this text was being missed by the participants. So, in this sprint we decided to add back in a visual scale which would give the participant the current reading on the scale.

4 day forecast

During sprint 5, we found that participants were looking at the 3 tabs for the forecast (‘Today, Tomorrow, Outlook’) and interpreting ‘Outlook’ as a single day, as opposed to the 3 remaining days of the 5 day forecast.

We decided to split the forecast to ‘Today’ (which was shown on the DAQI scale) and the remaining days of the forecast underneath on a separate scale.

UK forecast

The UK forecast, which is supplied by the Met office was kept in the format we receive which is ‘Today, Tomorrow and Outlook’.