Weather.com Offers Customized, Aggregated, Relevant, And Social Weather Content

Forrester has predicted that the next generation of online experience will be customized, aggregated, relevant, and social (CARS). We can already see early examples of companies that are transforming their digital offerings with these attributes. At the online portal of The Weather Channel, weather.com, a recent Web site redesign illustrates what CARS will mean for content sites. The redesign offers a variety of customization features to users, such as saving locations and accessing weather apps. It also allows them to access aggregated weather information on an interactive map. Users can access weather.com across a number of devices and share content both on the site and across a range of social media sites. Companies hoping to learn from the success seen by weather.com — which is an excellent example of the CARS framework — should conduct ethnographic research, beta test with early adopters, create a plan for easing user adoption, and then adapt for mainstream consumers. Although CARS projects may seem radical and novel, they should be evaluated with user feedback and down-to-earth metrics that are tied to business success.