The Weather Channel
More than utility
/ Timeline
Q4 2022 – Q1 2023
/ Squad
Customer Journey (Growth)
/ My Role
Acting design lead (product strategy • end-to-end design)
/ Platforms
iOS • Android
I led the redesign of Profile and Registration, transforming a utilitarian settings drawer into a hub for personalization and account management. By reframing registration as unlocking value such as cross-device consistency and a more relevant home feed, the redesign grew registered users from 500K to 6M and set the foundation for retention and engagement across 330M MAUs.
The redesigned app with streamlined navigation, customizable profile and onboarding, wellness hubs, and plan-ahead tools for trips, commutes, and daily routines.
/ challenge
How do you take a typically neglected corner of the app and turn it into an engine for activation and retention? That was the challenge issued in Q4 of 2022: show users why registration matters, and make it feel less like a toll booth and more like an invitation.
legacy settings drawer
/ Atmosphere
By 2023, personalization had shifted from feature to baseline. People wanted their apps to know them, to anticipate without overwhelming, to feel made for them while still holding the keys to their own experience (Forbes 2023).
Users were even showing more willingness to pay for that kind of care. And with Google aiming to phase out third-party data in 2022 (but later abandoned), AI-driven personalization was quickly emerging as the future to growth (Twilio 2023).
The weather channel app prior to the redesign
/ From Signals to Structure
Market trends weren’t abstract concepts; they gave shape to the structural changes that followed. Renaming “Settings” to “Profile” was the first signal of that shift. But more broadly, Profile was reimagined as the hub where registration unlocked more: notifications, saved places, reordered feeds, and widget and interest management.
But more broadly, Profile was reimagined as the hub where registration unlocked more: notifications, saved places, reordered feeds, and widget and interest management.
/ Beyond Launch
Profile was imagined as both an archive of choices and a scaffold for growth, a place where saving stories, following voices, and tailoring content could turn daily use into lasting connection.
/ Making meaning together
Card sorts and usability tests revealed what users needed most. To act on those findings, I hosted reviews, workshops, and playful “app battles” with product, engineering, and marketing to build alignment and keep conversion, subscriptions, and engagement central to our design decisions.
/ Research Insights (Card Sort)
75%
pushed legal and marketing items into “don’t care” buckets
2 Models
Younger users saw Profile as a dashboard. Older users saw Profile as account and subscription hub.
“Profile”
proved clearest, a single word that signaled belonging and made registration path legible
Tests showed users often didn’t know if they were anonymous, registered, or subscribed.
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Making status explicit and reframing registration as unlocking continuity reduced friction and drove activation.
Card sorting revealed the need for alanced daily habits with deeper control.Card sorting revealed a preference for logical nesting of utilities in Settings, while also wanting quick access to high-frequency actions.
Quick Actions surfaced frequent tasks, while full settings remained. This created micro-engagement loops and encouraged return visits.
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Early prototypes were overloaded, and not quite distinguishing accounts from subscriptions.
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Streamlining clarified boundaries and gave the “Make It Yours” card stack room to teach features.
/ Impact
15%
registration conversion lift after app redesign
500K → 6M
registered users
+561%
registrations YoY across apps and web (1.8M → 12.3M)
/ Outcome
