Only then did we finally decide to make it into an app. And at some point we liked it enough that we were using it and it was like, this is bad implementation-wise, but we're using it so it must be at least good enough. We prototyped a bunch of things for a long time, for like a year, just in a web view on an iPhone. If we don't have an idea, we won't continue wasting our time on this. We were like, why don't we do what we know how to do and test out if we even have an idea. JD: We began by making a web version of it first because we didn't know how to do native programming and we were lazy. You can just load up and read, and be done and not have to fuss around with gimmicks. Let's do a clean, readable, very straightforward forecasts weather app on one page. And that was the philosophy for it to begin with. We'll just make a weather app that just shows you that the damn forecasts straight up, no messing around. We wondered, why is this hard? It wouldn't be hard to do better or better than the ones that we've tried. Everybody makes one, and well, they're all terrible. We had both been complaining about the weather apps available at the time, which is hilarious because there's like literally 10,000 of them. So we were like, why don't we make an app on the side. We already had a native app team and we didn’t need that many people on the team. There were no positions for us at Basecamp. It was a moment where I thought maybe we ought to know more about this native app thing or just get some experience with it. And around that time - and it didn't really pan out this way - there was this fear in the web community that native apps were going to eat the web. JD: In 2014, Trevor and I were both web people and we'd been working on rails apps and websites and things like that for years. Let's tell everyone a little background about what the app is. My day job is to be a product designer at Basecamp, for the last 7 years.īilly Carlson: Great, it's a very cool side project. Jonas Downey: Hi everyone, my name is Jonas Downey and I'm the designer behind the app, Hello Weather, which is my side project. We wrap up the interview discussing tips on how to break into product design as a career. In this interview Jonas talks about the process of creating the ideal weather app, how he and the rest of the team did it, along with what it’s like to run an app as a business. Jonas is also the senior product designer at Basecamp and has been creating interfaces for well over a decade. For this interview we’re joined by the awesome designer behind the fantastic weather app, Hello Weather.
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