Know What I Want

I’m told that it has been a mild winter here in Missouri, but this past weekend it was going to snow. As someone who needed to get to work the next day and hasn’t driven in real snow in years, I went to the Internet to find out how much snow I was in for.

I started with weather.com since that is where I tend to get my weather reports from on the rare occasion that my typically indoors led life lends me to care. Now when you have heard that it is going to snow in your neighborhood, what is it that you want to know? When and how much. Keep that in mind while you view this screenshot from weather.com.

So how well does this answer my two questions? When is it going to snow? Looks like from ‘tonight’ through ‘tomorrow night’. Ok. And more importantly, how much? Uhm.. well, they guess it snowed 0.3in in the past 24 hours.

Ok, let’s pull up the 10-day section. Maybe that will break things down and tell us how much snow we will get each day. Seems a long shot, but whatever.

So… 90% chance that will there will be precipitation tomorrow, and the icon says snow. Well, that’s not helpful. Can I drive to work tomorrow or not?

Since I still don’t have actual answers, I went over to accuweather.com. And here’s what I get.

What do we have here? Winter Weather Advisory until Tuesday right at the top in red. I’m certainly interested in that and didn’t even know I was. And what’s that other alert? 5.1 inches of snow coming my way! Exactly why I am here. See how easy that was?

Know what your user is after and give it to them. In this case, AccuWeather nailed it. Weather.com forced me to another site. Guess whose site I will be looking at from now on.