Jetset Weather

The first version of Jetset Weather is finally done and I am more than happy with the result. Check it out on jetsetweather.com.
Of course I still have many ideas, but I feel it is a good time now to release and get some feedback to see where to head next! Feel free to send me your feedback.

I found out that designing and developing at the same time, as fun as it sounds, does not work well. And as a designer I knew that late design changes can have a big impact on the entire product. Therefore I started to design my new concept (using Figma), mobile first and focusing on re-usable components. I have many years of experience in UX design so it took me only about a week to have everything ready to start developing. This was a very good decision, because the development became a lot easier since I a had an entire 'blueprint' that I could look at every day and see where I was standing and what is next.

At this moment I was getting much more convenient with Angular and web development in general. I had built many features but there seemed to be a lack of focus because I was doing too many things at once, so I decided to take a step back and evaluate. I ended up ditching many features that I had built and decided to focus on the main user stories:

• I do not know where to go on vacation but have an idea of when and what type of weather I want.
• I know where to go, but I do not know when.
• I have a few places in mind but I want to compare to see where, when and in which order I should go.

Here I also decided to add flight prices as it seemed like many people I talked to found it an interesting idea to see the weather and flights together.

Angular turned out to be a longer learning process than I originally expected (as usual), but I started to like how it worked. At this moment I was adding data, experimenting with some features, working on adding data and making things look nice and responsive at the same time.

My demo was interesting but could not do much yet, so I decided to start with this as my official project work with a js framework. I chose Angular because it was recommended to me by a few friends and I liked that there was a somewhat strict way of working.

At the end of my trip I had seen a lot from the world and finished my first demo. I found out a few things:

• It is much harder to learn web development and make a simple product than I thought it would be.
• Pure JS / Jquery does not work well for me to keep my code organized.
• If I actually want to build something I need some monetization strategies.

While I was traveling I started to learn HTML / CSS / JS. I had very limited experience in these languages, therefore it took some time to get going. Seriously CSS is just strange sometimes... How did people make websites before 'flexbox' and 'grid'? Anyway, very frustrating in the beginning but was getting better and better at it. I took my original idea as a test project and started building a demo.

I quit my full time job as a UX designer and wanted to start traveling for a few months. I already had a few places in mind where I wanted to go to. So I started to look around online get some info and to make a planning. Weather was important to me, because when you travel for a long time, you want to minimize the amount of clothes you take with you. Although there is a lot of weather info around the web, I found myself making an excel sheet and documenting different weather parameters. This was a very tedious process, so naturally the question came to mind: why can't I just have a place where I can just compare weather averages to help plan my trip.