CREATESPACE Weather Map Design and Configuration User Interface

During the past few years in the field of weather map production there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of more informative, decorative and up to date layouts for the weather products. Additionally, the weather products should only be created on demand in order to save server computing power and storage resources. This has led the case organization, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, to consider more modern ways to produce, configure and deliver weather data to the audi-ences. This thesis concerns the creation of the design and configuration user interface for weather maps and animations. The requirements for the user interface included that it had to be effortless to use even for the non-technical end users of the case organization. Additionally, the user interface should be implemented in the existing weather delivery channel of the case organization. The theoretical part of this thesis describes the main principles for creating a test plan to acquire information of the user interface even without writing a single line of code. In the practical part, the acquired test results were utilized to develop an easy to use interface and a working prototype was developed. The methods and theory presented in the thesis should be applicable to other user interface design and development projects too. The findings of this study indicate that it is recommended that the case organiza-tion utilizes the usability testing methods increasingly in the future to achieve user friendly user interfaces in the upcoming UI development projects.