Apple iOS 14 has brought many new features to phones and tablets. For the first time, I enrolled in the beta versions of the operating system for the iPhone just because I wanted to explore the user experience (UX) of the widgets.

Long story short, I really loved them, especially the weather widget because of how intuitive it is about the information that it displays. Generally, we are accustomed to the static widgets that they only update the information every 10 minutes and that’s all, but what Apple did with the weather widget was phenomenal. Depending on the time of the day it is able to display the most important information for users to read and make appropriate decisions.

During the day, you can see the current temperature and weather forecast for the following 6 hours, plus the highest and lowest temperature of the day. However, during the night, it makes a short suggestion about the following day, for example, Warmer tomorrow with a high of 29ºC. It is fantastic because you can plan the day ahead. I call this feature Adaptive Information, and this is what I will value as a user from an air quality monitor or and AQ app.

It will be great if I see a similar widget from an AQ monitor. Let’s see how I envision this feature. Although it is iOS orientated, the developers could just keep such features for the app itself in case they have a hard time developing a widget for Android.

So the philosophy is the same, depending on the time of the day and maybe the location, the AQ widget adapts the information to fit the user’s current needs. As you can see in the mockup above, the widget during the morning (left iPhone) checks for the outdoor conditions and AQI and advise the user to ventilate the room when the ambient air is good. During the night, the widget or app checks again the conditions inside your home where the user and the AQ monitor is placed and advise you accordingly. In this case, it has detected high CO2 concentrations, and it knows that soon the user will go to bed. In case the user doesn’t have an automatic HVAC system, which could communicate via HomeKit or IFTTT, then he/she has to open a window.

Conclusion

The only problem I see with such technology is the price it requires from companies to develop, but remember from a previous post of mine, we need to build software services in order to survive the hardware competition. Designing compelling ecosystems that are hard to resist is the key to success.