New BOM Website

[old man emu]

4 hours ago, octave said:

Is it objectively poor or just slower until you get to know it?

I suppose that I should know by now that for all my bitching, the site is going to be what it is from now on. With a bit of playing about with it, I'll get used to it.

 

I just found how to display all the information I want, including the radar image, and I've replaced the old bookmark link with the one that takes me to Gilgandra's info. 

[octave]

2 minutes ago, old man emu said:

With a bit of playing about with it, I'll get used to it.

I believe in you OME 🙂

[rgmwa]

This doesn't make much sense to me.

[spacesailor]

BOM ,  must be  BAD ! .

october 22nd , Hottest day ,almost 40 °   Penrith .

bom Launch october 22 nd GOT COOLER every day since .

(  16 °,back in winter clothing ).

spacesailor

Edited Tuesday at 07:58 AM by spacesailor

[octave]

1 hour ago, rgmwa said:

This doesn't make much sense to me.

 

It means no chance of rain, doesn't it?  It might seem odd when there is no rain predicted, but  I assume those headings are there all the time and they are populated with data. If there is no rain forecast, then the columns are populated with zero mm. What should it say?. If I look at Brisbane at 5PM, there is a 25% (low ) chance of at least 9mm and a 50% chance of at least 4mm. 

 

I don't think this way of expressing the probability of rain has changed much. Here is the predicted rainfall from the old BOM site.

https://reg.bom.gov.au/jsp/watl/rainfall/pme.jsp  You need to click on the chance of rainfall button.

 

I am not sure if it is any better than the new site.  I guess we want to know if it is likely to rain, and if it does, how much rain is likely.

 

I think both old and new sites can display forecasts to various levels of detail

 

These are both from the new site

 

 

This is from the old site.

 

It just tells us that there is a high chance it will rain up to 4mm without predicting whether it will be more likely to be at the high end of that prediction or the low end.

 

In any case, I don't see these differences are big enough to drive someone to end it all.   There are other weather services, such as Williweather or Weatherzone or Weatherwatch or Elders, among others, as well for the time being, the old.

BOM site. I read an article where a man said he wanted to smash his phone with a hammer. This seems to be a little over the top, and I expect it was a bit with a little help from the rage-farming media outlets.  

 

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 09:09 AM by octave

[rgmwa]

11 minutes ago, octave said:

It means no chance of rain, doesn't it? 

Well, a `medium to very low chance of at least zero' rain, is a funny way to say no rain expected but I guess they are stuck with the heading format which works fine for when some rain is forecast. 

[Jerry_Atrick]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-29/bureau-of-meteorology-ordered-to-fix-website-after-backlash/105945832?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other

[onetrack]

I find the Farmonline Weather website more user-friendly, having a better layout, and with more usable features, than the new BOM website.

 

I guess the BOM will get something right eventually, after multiple ham-fisted and poor attempts at producing what people actually want.

 

https://www.farmonlineweather.com.au/place/wa/perth/6000/maps

 

I especially like the options under "layers" when viewing the forecast map, to be able to select "hourly rainfall", rather than the default 10:00PM daily conditions.

 

https://www.farmonlineweather.com.au/place/wa/perth/6000/maps/forecast

 

Edited yesterday at 06:30 AM by onetrack

[octave]

6 minutes ago, onetrack said:

I find the Farmonline Weather website more user-friendly, having a better layout,

I do like this radar display, large, zoomable and draggable, unlike the postage stamp-sized old BOM radar. I do find I have about 4 links to different weather services, depending on what I am after.

[facthunter]

It's been evaluated by reputable organisations and found wanting.  Nev

[old man emu]

I saw that the head of the BOM has acknowledged that the new format is not a 100% winner and that it will be reviewed to see how it can become a better product. As long as the reviewers are people who actually want to use the site to easily obtain the information that they need for planning future activities. It seems that the beta version was reviewed by website developers who were no doubt expert in developing websites to meet current design fashions, but were not expert in what people actually used the information for. 

 

The site has gone live and those people who actually use teh information have reviewed the site and found it wanting. I said before that the new site won't be taken down and a return to the old site made. Let's battle on for a little while to see if the new site can be amended in response to users' comments.

[octave]

With any new website, there will always be tweaks and improvements to be made; this is true of all software and websites.  I am sure that there are many legitimate complaints, as there was and still is with the old website.   Most news articles I have read seem to be full of hysteria and fail to actually fact-check.   "There's no rain data" some people have been reported as saying, and here I am looking at rain data.

 

Some people have suggested that the new site was about a sexy, sleek new look; however, having talked to someone in the know, it seems that the old site had many vulnerabilities.  These were exploited during a cyber attack in 2015 

 

 Australian Bureau of Meteorology hacked by foreign spies, cybersecurity report reveals

 

 

I believed that the old site caused a similar controversy when it replaced the one before in 2020.

 

Here is an article that I feel is more balanced than some of the rage-bait articles.

 

Storm in a teacup or dark clouds: why do people hate the BoM website redesign?

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

To be uite honest, I am ambivalent to the BOM (and UK MetOffice) sites. I use Skydemon for my weather, or third party sites. 

 

In the field of technology, relatively recent specalisms are UI/UX. UI = user interface, and UX = user experience. The latter is about the expeience of the site, and the former is the physical implementation of the desired experience. Personally, I think the specialisms are... hmm... immature. UX evolves from different areas, but the UK government User Experience standards seems to be either the genesis or distiallation of these principles.

 

And, they suck, One of the things UI/UX people have to do is cater for the different capabilities of users - and the range of disabilities they have - hearing, vision, motor, muscular and no doubt many other types of  impediments need to be catered for to ensure accessibility as much as possible to everyone. And that also includes the mental impediments, and even just ignorance of the particular subject. That is a good thing that user interfaces seek to cater to the vast arrany of people that would otherwsie be left behind.

 

The problem is, they tend to wrap it up in one user interface - a sort of one size fits all. The problem with that is the majority of people don't have all of the impediments they are seeking to cater for. The result is generally able bodied and minded people are presented, what to them are inefficeint or even patronising user interfaces, and in fact some mixes of impediments are disadvantaged.  

 

One solution is to have different UIs for different types of users - but there are too many variations to be practical. Where do you draw the line? However, the MetOffice (whose site I haven't been on for a while) took a different approach, although it seems to have changed... there are different use cases for weather.. There is general use, agriculture, aviation, etc. The MetOffice had microsites for the major use cases and everything else was in the general site. 

 

It seems to have changed to when I was last on it, maybe they are now charging (I didn't spend enough time on it): https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/services/business-industry/agriculture

 

This is where the UI/UX profression has, IMHO, a long way to go.. The one sixe fits all is terrible. The uk.gov websites may makle it accessible to disabled people, which is good, but there is no option for abled people to do their business in an optimised manner, which is bad - but I guess with the investment budget available, they can't please everyone and the better of the two options is to be inclusive. 

 

I think one of the problems with these site revamps is no 12 of this humourous internet salvo from days gone by: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/car-balk/

 

Re the UI verus cybersecurity vulnerabilities - the site could have its sybersecurity flaws addressed without chaning the UI itself (no doubt code would have to change, but the UI could have been faithfully replicated - but with improvements to scrolling, area selection, etc). 

 

I don't mind the BOM website, but in honesty, I wouldn't see myself using it anyway.