To give a bit of background story, this is a personal project, that has emerged from my personal frustration with umbrellas.
I basically really dislike bringing an umbrella with me, as it brings so much complexities. Take for example the case that you buy a too big and expensive umbrella (e.g. for golfers), it is actually a hassle to drag along - just by its weight and size. It is also something you will most likely lose during a company event, after one or two drinks .
If you buy a small and cheap version, you won’t get sufficient protection due to the small surface. In addition, they tend to break quickly, and when this happens, you might as well not have had one with you in the first place.
The bottom line is that I believe that everyone wants to minimise their interaction with umbrellas. And in order to do so, you need to know if it's going to rain or not. That is exactly what this web app tries to solve, by basically sending you automated alerts just before you leave your doorsteps.
Btw, its not just for a rainy audience, it can be also used in sunny regions. If you are one of those lucky ones that live in a sunny region, you probably do not look at the weather forecast on a regular basis. As a pre-emptive measure, you can set up an alert to not get caught by surprise when it actually does rain.
Happy to have your feedback on the idea and execution!
I like the idea and congratulations in the execution.
Some ideas, just to improve the solution, they're not too important:
- The idea of introducing the city and then I have to click validate is not the usual thing to do, usually the user gets a dropdown where he/she selects the proper city. As Google does nowadays with the searchbar.
- I would like to see the current prediction the site is giving me for today. I just want to see that "it works" before I give you my email :)
-Could it all be in a single form? I don't like to go through "3 pages" for filling one field in each. I think you can simplify it.
- The grey bar confused me a little, I thought it was to fill in there some info.
Again, take it as a constructive feedback, in general I like the idea :D
Thank you so much, and I love all of your feedback. Love the detail that you noticed the grey bar, which was bothering me as well this morning. I will be immediately on it, stay tuned on this page once its delivered.
Nice idea, but it's too much noise for too low information: usually when going out, you not only need to check on rain for an umbrella but also on temperature to know what to wear (do you need that scarf?) and maybe sunglasses, or if you are on a bike, ... so simply opening a weather app gives much more for the time you spend processing information
That makes sense. It opens the door to some additional features to be included...
For me, the umbrella was the biggest hurdle. But as you rightfully explain other factors can be important as well. Thank you for the feedback!
The privacy policy concerns me a bit. It's clearly copy/pasted from somewhere else (still has `[name]` and `[website]` placeholders) which means the author really hasn't given much thought into privacy, or perhaps they're not being entirely truthful.
Is the data being sold? What security measures have you taken? You're tying email addresses to physical locations, this is a goldmine of information for all sorts of actors.
Thank you for this feedback. Also, good to know that people actually do read all of those items. I will put more thought into it, and clarify indeed those concerns.
The decision to take an umbrella shouldn't be about the probability of rain, but about the cost of being rained upon vs the cost of taking an umbrella.
It doesn't matter if there's only a 1% chance of rain if you're parading your sugar sculpture around town all day. Similarly a 90% chance of rain when you're driving to and from a friend's house can be largely ignored.
> The decision to take an umbrella shouldn't be about the probability of rain, but about the cost of being rained upon vs the cost of taking an umbrella.
A good example is Seattle and surrounding areas. When I lived in central California, Southern California, and the Bay Area in California I used my umbrella many times a year.
In Seattle and the surrounding areas I've used my umbrella maybe 10 times in the last ~30 years.
Seattle gets much more total rain than those other places, and has many more rainy days, so it might seem odd that I'd use my umbrella much less frequently.
The difference is that in Seattle unless you are obsessive about having your umbrella with you at all times except maybe during the summer, you are going to get caught in the rain without it. After that happens a few times you realize that because most of the time our rain is not very intense you didn't actually get too wet--in the time it took to walk between buildings or between a building and your transportation you only got a little wet.
If that bothers you a hat or a hoodie will take care of it, without the annoyance of having to dedicate a hand to holding an umbrella.
When we do get the intense rain that will get you seriously soaked in a short time it usually only lasts a short time then it is back to the mild rain that your hat can handle.
Those 10 times I used my umbrella here? About half of them were shortly after I moved to here, before I figured out that going around one handed for at least half the year is way more annoying for not really much noticeable gain over getting a hat with a wide enough brim to keep the rain off my glasses.
The other half was recently after I installed gutter guards around my house and garage and made some adjustments to the drainage around the downspouts, and specifically went out during those brief periods of very intense rain to check that the gutter guards could handle the flow and the the water was ending up where it was supposed to end up.
I was first expecting the ability to see if I needed an umbrella _now_ compared to in the future.
Then I got stuck for a little while trying to change the location from SF, I couldn't tell where I needed to click or that I did end up focusing something. The top line to the form sort of looked like it was trying to be a material design field, and the card with SF in it looked like it was supposed to be editable - it is editable, I just happened to only be clicking on the pin (and didn't notice the slight state change when I found the input).
If you auto-detect a timezone, it's probably better to guess that as a default location vs SF?
Amazing feedback, I love the idea to see directly from the page itself if you need an umbrella now. Also as someone else pointed out, it also allows you to check if it works before you input an email.
For the input, yes happy to change that directly. Maybe adding a X would help to clear the current input.
As for the auto-detect of the location, this just needs a bit tweaking with the Google Maps API. I did not get to it yet, but I am happy to hear that this addition would be appreciated.
Happy to include the major feedbacks in the next first release (by tomorrow).
Imho, this only make sense as an unobtrusive indicator next to the front door where the umbrella's are (and then I do see it making sense, with some extra info like temp). I feel like taking out my phone or forcing me to look at it even just one extra time is not something I want to do to myself.
It's like my smarthome, I either automate or make a (smart) button. Taking out the phone is a no no, but there is certainly a place for stuff like this.
I really wish my Nest V3 was more hackable, it's in such a central location and I look at that thing so often... and it tells me so little.
Oh and as a Dutch person we already look at buienradar [0] a lot and buienalarm [1] is also pretty popular here, both do notifications (maybe not at custom times, more like in 10 min or so I think, to be honest I think the apps are wrong too often to really trust them).
I have an Echo Show (the one with the screen) in a central location in my kitchen. It is too busy showing me stupid jokes that I could ask it to tell me to actually give me any useful information.
When I have timers going, it doesn't even display the timer on the screen so I have to ask Alexa to tell me the timer status every few minutes. Sometimes it puts it in a tiny little font in the upper right hand corner as if stupid jokes are more important than the timer I am literally waiting on.
My favorite is when I'm cooking and I have background music on along with 4 or 5 timers running at the same time and it thinks the most important thing I want to see are the lyrics to the song that it's playing.
"Alexa, stop showing me lyrics" does nothing. "Alexa, leave the timer on the screen" does nothing. It's amazing how much improvement potential there is in these devices.
Thank you everyone for the much appreciated feedback. Based on the initial discussion, I just released a new version that takes into account one of the major requests, which is to have on the front page a preview of the alert.
I'm always a little confused by the reduction of weather data into something so binary. As AndrewOMartin said, even "taking an umbrella" is contextual, and should probably be at least some form of time-graph so that you can at least check for however long you plan to be outside for.
That said: combining data for heuristics is a nice way to simply an onslaught of data. For example, the above graph might be nicely expressed by something similar to but not exactly like "expected rainfall" (which accounts for chance of rain but also intensity). For temperature, "feels like", combining the various factors that actually affect skin temperature - wind and moisture included [0] - is probably best.
I recieved a very fine umbrella as a gift once (James Smith & Sons. solid stick) and the joke around the house became "pop or fop?" As in what was the percent chance of precipitation (p.o.p) that excused carrying the umbrella that day whereby I would not just be a fop carrying the umbrella as an accessory?
It was so fine, I'd want to carry it for anything over 50%, but I knew it was being a bit dandyish, so a decade and some later, nowadays I don't bring it with me unless it's actually raining.
Perhaps a future feature of this app would be not so much whether to carry an umbrella on a given day, but whether it is appropriate to carry a certain umbrella. I'm sure the owners of JS&S would have some insight!
I was curious where the weather data comes from (since it seems to be a pain to gather it reliably, globally, and preferably for free), the "learn more" page didn't mention that, but mentioned the following:
> Hassle free, our AI will remind you of bringing an umbrella on a rainy day
Which made me to wonder whether it just guesses that based on the date and city name; might be nice to expand on both "AI" usage and weather sources.
Wasn't able to check that it works without entering email and setting a notification either (as some of the other comments mentioned already, it's what one may expect). Also as others mentioned, 3 forms seem unnecessary. And JS seems unnecessary as well.
Thank you for the feedback. Yes its indeed from OpenWeatherAPI. I will include this in the learn more. It's a good idea indeed to add a testing functionality, will be on it straight away.
I entered 'Sudbury, MA' --> NOK, 'Sudbury' validates to 'Greater Sudbury (CA)', 'Sudbury (MA)' --> NOK. Tried with a neighboring city in Massachusetts, 'Concord' --> Validates as fine but given the experience with Sudbury, it isn't obvious which of the ~35 Concords that there are in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord).
I had similar issues with the location verification. Dublin auto validated to Dublin (US) - probably Dublin, Georgia. When I typed "Dublin, Ireland" that returned "Location not found". I needed to type "Dublin, IE" to get it to accept my location.
That being said, living in Ireland, I usually bring an umbrella anyway because the weather here is maliciously designed to give you trust issues.
Actually no its using OpenWeatherAPI, but as a mvp I did not include the Google Maps autocomplete functionality. It's a small thing to add, happy to include in the next release (by tomorrow based on all the feedback here).
HAHA! Yes, let's do that... coming right up! Joke aside, I also have a small special one, but that one tends to break so quickly. Also, I don't like having things in my pocket.
2. Add a more general alert, for paid subscribers. I'd easily pay $5 or $10/month for something to just tell me what I need that day (and maybe when generally I'll need it)
All the weather apps (that I know of, I haven't researched this) show me the weather and then want ME to figure it out. I don't want to figure it out. If I can trust you, I'd rather lean on you.
Great idea, and I really like the design of the site. One thing that could be improved is the navigation between policies. The 'down arrow' confused me since I expected the policy would open directly below the headline, and the page navigate to "Available policies" instead of the start of the actual policy.
Umbrella is also used when weather is very hot, aka super sunny days. This app should factor that in as well rather than just exclusively for rainy days.
Ha! I would never have thought of that. You can also see it from the other way around, when its a sunny period for a long time, you are more likely to be caught by surprise (of rain), as you are less likely to look at the weather forecast.
I basically really dislike bringing an umbrella with me, as it brings so much complexities. Take for example the case that you buy a too big and expensive umbrella (e.g. for golfers), it is actually a hassle to drag along - just by its weight and size. It is also something you will most likely lose during a company event, after one or two drinks . If you buy a small and cheap version, you won’t get sufficient protection due to the small surface. In addition, they tend to break quickly, and when this happens, you might as well not have had one with you in the first place.
The bottom line is that I believe that everyone wants to minimise their interaction with umbrellas. And in order to do so, you need to know if it's going to rain or not. That is exactly what this web app tries to solve, by basically sending you automated alerts just before you leave your doorsteps.
Btw, its not just for a rainy audience, it can be also used in sunny regions. If you are one of those lucky ones that live in a sunny region, you probably do not look at the weather forecast on a regular basis. As a pre-emptive measure, you can set up an alert to not get caught by surprise when it actually does rain.
Happy to have your feedback on the idea and execution!