Travel Forecast
A weather product for journeys, not locations. Shipped inside The Weather Channel app at 100M+ monthly active users.
Overview
Travel Forecast is a journey-level weather product I led at The Weather Company. It turns multi-city trip planning into a single scannable view: timelines, risk windows, proactive guidance. I owned the product and UX direction, defined the trip flows, designed the input and forecast experiences, and worked with engineering on data feasibility. It shipped across The Weather Channel's web, iOS, and Android at 100M+ monthly active users.
The challenge
Travel is one of the moments when weather matters most. A sunny-day forecast is convenient, but a storm during a flight connection can derail entire trips. Yet most weather apps are location-centric. They answer “what is the weather here?” but travellers need “what will the weather be across my journey?”
The pain points were clear: travellers manually checking multiple cities, no visibility into layover weather risk, delays discovered too late, fragmented planning scattered across apps, and a constant undercurrent of anxiety about unknown conditions. At The Weather Company we had the data, the audience, and the forecasting infrastructure. What we didn't have was a product that connected those dots for people in motion.
The reframe
Stop asking “what's the weather?” Start asking “what does the weather mean for my trip?”
The unlock was watching how frequent travellers actually used existing weather apps: they opened them five times in a single trip plan, once per city, then mentally stitched the results together while worrying about the layover they hadn't checked yet. The product wasn't a forecast tool. It was a stitching tool that didn't exist. Once that landed, every other decision followed (the timeline visualisation, the risk-based language, the journey-level aggregation).
Key decisions
Journey, not location
I reframed the mental model from city-based weather to trip-based weather. Instead of showing conditions for a single pin on the map, users could input their departure city, destination, dates, layovers, and flight numbers when available. The system aggregated weather across locations and time windows into a single connected view. Tradeoff: the input form gets more complex than a search bar. Win: travellers stop opening the app five times per trip.
Risk-based language, not raw weather
Rather than temperature and rain probability, the focus shifted to travel impact. Storm probability translated into “moderate delay risk at your layover”. A 60% chance of rain becomes “tight connection risk due to storms”. Tradeoff: I gave up some precision for translation. Win: the forecast actually drives action instead of generating anxiety.
Timeline as the backbone
I designed the experience around a trip timeline that showed departure weather, layover conditions, arrival forecast, and key risk windows on a single scannable surface. Users could assess their journey without drilling into individual cities. Tradeoff: a timeline is harder to make legible at a glance than a list of cards. Win: the multi-step lookup collapsed into a single view.
Proactive guidance, not alarms
Where risk was high, the interface surfaced contextual prompts: “potential delay risk”, “tight connection risk due to storms”, “consider earlier arrival at the airport”. The tone stayed informative, not alarmist. Tradeoff: I had to walk a fine line between useful warnings and the kind of fearmongering that trains users to dismiss notifications. Win: the product gives travellers just enough signal to adjust without triggering anxiety.
Impact
Shipped across The Weather Channel's web, iOS, and Android at 100M+ monthly active users.
Introduced journey-level planning to a product previously locked to single-location forecasts.
Proactive risk windows flagged weather disruptions before departure rather than during the trip.
Differentiated the app from standard weather experiences with a travel-specific pattern.
Established a reusable journey-based framework extensible to road trips, multi-city tours, and event planning.
Reflection
Travel Forecast reinforced something I keep coming back to: senior design is about reframing problems, not polishing interfaces. The strongest move on this project wasn't a better weather card. It was changing the question from “what's the weather?” to “what does the weather mean for my trip?”
The reframe changed how the team talked about the product surface. The journey-based framework became a reusable pattern in the app. Travel was no longer a single-location problem.