>BBC Weather is flawed and angry making
>Firstly it’s been a very long time since I wrote a blog post. You know how it is, new job, new Christmas, new recession.
So what with all the #uksnow action on twitter I found myself on the Beta BBC weather site. A couple of years ago, the BBC weather forecast changed to the new flying cameras circus. Since then I’ve been quite annoyed by the terrible usability of this ‘look how clever we are at the weather’ approach. What I dislike so much is not the flying cameras, indeed I love flying cameras – especially on golf coverage, but the way the new weather displays leave me often confused about what weather I can expect. Surely that is the whole point of the weather forecast. Next time you watch the BBC forecast, see how much you have to concentrate to figure out if generally tomorrow will be warm/cold/wet or sunny. There are three major problems:
1. Gone are the wonderfully simple and clear symbols which everyone (the world over) understands.
Now instead of using sun symbols and cloud symbols, sunny and cloudy days are represented by slightly different colours of brown. I believe that a beautiful hot summery day is is now explained by light brown and cloud by dark brown. Obviously. They could have at least chosen green. Rain is of course blue, heavy rain.. em dark blue…. fog is white..snow is… em white. The flaw in this is illustrated beautifully by the fact that the new BBC Beta site requires a Key to explain the weather – something hardly necessary until a couple of years ago.
So, medium blue could be heavy frost, heavy rain or temperature of -6 degrees. The difference between heavy and light fog is almost imperceptible. In fact, it is so confusing they need a key to differentiate between lakes and rivers and really low temperatures. I’m sure anyone partially sighted or colour blind is absolutely baffled (never mind the people paying for a black and white TV licence – £47 per year FYI). The increasing need to listen to the commentary, because the browns aren’t clear enough, is equally not so great for non-English speakers or those with hearing difficulties.
2. The new report is far too detailed for the average person.
90% of the British population need to know if it will be rainy, warm, cold, sunny or dry tomorrow. That’s the level of detail most people require for the decisions they need to make. Now we get so much information that it’s hard to take on board and mentally summarise. So it’s going to rain at 2:34 tomorrow afternoon for 10 minutes north of Bristol is kind of useful, but not as useful as ‘generally tomorrow around Bristol it will be wet’. Meteorologists stop showing off how accurately you can now predict the weather – it’s too much for our needs. It’s like the time, I generally need to know the time to the nearest few minutes not milliseconds.
3. They’ve taken the joy out of the weather.
People like talking about the weather, this method of forecasting reduces it to a dull scientific experiment I can barely listen to for five minutes.
In the UK we generally have a wet climate. When it’s sunny we really want to shout about it and celebrate it. Now, if it’s sunny in the UK, the BBC forecast indicates this with a light brown colour, which you could interpret as ‘no weather’. Where’s the fun in that? We want WOO HOO IT’S SUNNY LOOK AT ALL THE LITTLE YELLOW SUN SYMBOLS. If you’re going to have to use colours at least indicate sunny with the brightest yellow you can find and make us all feel good.
I predict another few years of this nonsense until the BBC can return to the old system without embarrassment and we’ll see a return to good old fashioned simple and usable weather forecasting. If the whole thing was proving a success the new BBC weather site would be using little brown squares to represent sunny days.
Tomorrow will probably be snowy by the way.
One step closer to the future
>BBC TV programmes put on iTunes
Great to see the BBC doing something in online video ahead of the competition, it’s been a while! One step forward to the future that we’re moving towards.
And here is a glimpse of that future at www.locatetv.com the first site I’ve seen which combines EPGs for online, television and DVDs. This allows you to search for a programme, find out when it’s next on TV (you can specify your TV provider details) and also find out where it’s available to view online.
The results returned are variable. 4OD content doesn’t appear while iPlayer content does, and you certainly notice the broadcasters which aren’t making their content available online – how long can they afford not to be doing this? Locate TV is far from a fully formed useful product that people will use. However it works, is intuitive and shows how television and online video could exist together in the future.
An interesting aspect is how they’re also pushing Movies and actors. Hmm.
Give it a whirl:
PS: Latest on the Max Gogarty Saga.
Read MoreTelly writers think we’re all geeks
>I love it when writers of mass media refer to new technologies on their programmes. These embarrassing attempts usually happen when they feel they have to keep the programme current or of the time. Sadly these excursions into the real world are almost always highly embarrassing, mainly illustrating how far most TV writers are behind the rest of us technopeople – the folks who use the internet, ipods and gasp, mobile phones.
British Soaps are usually fairly good at it, dropping in a telltale beep beep accompanied by someone fumbling in a pocket for a mobile. Then comes the inevitable very still and overly long extreme close up of a four year old phone showing a text message. Where they tend to really fall down is that usually the message is in awful text speak with lots of GR8, CU 2Nite action. It doesn’t matter who sends the text, whether they are fourteen or forty, that’s how the technopeople talk when using Short Message Service technology.
The Archers radio soap (now available as a podcast) does this a lot as well, but someone I’m more forgiving of this, maybe I’m just more forgiving of The Archers in general. Several years ago there were the Ambridge website storylines, which still crop up now an again. ‘We’re avin a plowin competition and we’d like to put a story up on the website’. It’s endearing, but we all know that putting anything on that site is pointless, it must get minimal traffic.
Just recently an older couple (Phil and Jill I think) are going on a trip to Hong Kong and their granddaughter Pip has been setting up an email address for them. At one point a blog was mentioned but thankfully the idea was poo pooed.
Which brings us round to a recent attempt on CSI. It’s all going fairly well, nice and brief screen shots of Twitter, hey we’re cool with Twitter, IM, blogging, we don’t need to make a big deal about this. But then woops, the writers slip up and reveal what they really think of us technopeople. See if you can spot it:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT5yCnEr8kQ&rel=1]
Yip, ‘they don’t expect privacy, they value openness’. Pause. I’m not sure where to even begin with this. I do like the other chap’s response though.
The writers then run out of words and make a schoolboy error, throwing in the word ‘virtual’. Nobody uses that word anymore, not even my Aunt Hilda who just got email and broadband. And nobody would ever ever use it in the phrase “looks like a virtual love triangle to me.”
Yip telly writers thing we’re all geeks, although we do value openness.
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