Software Experience
05 Aug 2024
Data visualization software, like Dark Sky (the popular weather app that Apple acquired last year and subsequently discontinued), goes beyond simply displaying data in attractive graphs. The software seamlessly integrate into people's daily lives. That is what makes an amazing software experience.
This thought has been aptly put in this article that I came across today - A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece
“team clearly obsessed over how people would actually use the app on a daily basis.”
"Dark Sky started with publicly available data, augmented it with contextualized predictions, rigorously iterated on data visualization design, and packaged all of this into a contextualized experience to make weather data useful for me in my daily life."
"While the availability of data has never been higher, we’re still missing software experiences that contextualize that data to make our lives better. Data alone isn’t enough."
"The world needs more Dark Sky-like experiences to help us improve our spending habits, help us sleep better, and more. If you’re working on information software, I hope you can be inspired by the body of design and engineering work that Dark Sky pioneered."
We need more developers to start thinking about the software experience than to just write code and get things working!