Internal Project

Wunderground.com Redesign: The First 24 Hours

After more than 10 years with the same design and layout, Weather Underground launched their new website on February 1st, 2011. Just in time for Groundhog Day, and right in the middle of one of the largest snowstorms to hit the US.

With an avid, vociferous following of more than 20 million users we knew there would be a strong reaction. After all, nobody likes change. Or do they?

We monitored tweets mentioning wunderground to see if the reactions were positive (Win!), negative (Fail!) or mixed (Not sure), and visualized the results.

From 720 total tweets during the first 24 hours, almost half were about the redesign. Of these, more than half were positive, with the remainder split between negative and mixed.

By far the biggest topic was the new visual design, but there was also a lot of commentary on the timing of the launch and, as expected, a lot of resistance to any kind of change.