Understand Users Language

One of my colleague said last week that, Yahoo weather is better than weather dot com. I was totally surprised and asked him the reason. My friend said, Yahoo has the facility of checking the weather in Celsius as well as Fahrenheit & weather.com don't have the conversion displayed.

I was surprised to know from him, which I didn't' noticed because I check on Fahrenheit. Immediately went to the website and felt that what he said was true. I was about to leave my suggestion to the webmaster. Before that I wanted to confirm again and checked properly. Then I got cleared that even weather.com has the conversion facility.

Conversion is right above the today's weather unit and shows as English | Metrics. Which is not users language. Generally users say Fahrenheit or Celsius. As of my knowledge, In South Asia units used are Celsius. Most of the people are not aware of English and Metrics. And its very much possible that many of the south Asians like my colleague will not be comfortable to use weather.com

See how weather.com & Yahoo weather interpret the same information in different way. Yahoo shows units as Fahrenheit and Celsius. And weather dot com is showing as English and Metrics.
From this screenshots, its clear that - Yahoo! has better way of understanding the users language.

Its always important that even if you are making a smaller widget, please keep users in mind. Especially sites like weather.com are used by multi cultural people. Suggest Usability !!!


Yahoo Weather








Weather.com