Case Study · Bell Media / CP24
CP24 is Toronto's 24-hour news channel. Weather is one of the main reasons people open its app, and switching cities was the part they kept struggling with. I redesigned it inside an app redesign already in flight. The layout carried into CTV News, the two apps came to share a search pattern, and the same weather view became a widget in the local section.
01 · The Problem
I ran usability benchmarking on the apps every quarter. City switching had surfaced in earlier rounds and came up again in the most recent one. The goal was clear: make moving between cities feel natural enough that users never have to think about it.
Existing Research · Benchmarking · Q4 2023
Known issues with the old experience
02 · Competitive Analysis
Before designing, I looked at how leading weather apps handled city switching to identify patterns worth borrowing. Users arrive at CP24 with habits formed elsewhere, so I ran the same task on AccuWeather and The Weather Network with 5 participants in Canada who check the weather daily or weekly on their phone.
What participants asked for, separate from what I watched them do
03 · Usability Testing
Method
I recruited participants who check the weather daily or weekly, 5 on each app, and watched one thing closely: which route they took to switch cities. Most attempts ended at the right screen, so the signal was path, not outcome.
Key takeaways
04 · Wireframes
With the research settled, I moved into wireframes and took them to our weekly engineering meeting. Two questions mattered: whether the data feed could support saved locations and reordering, and whether swiping between cities was buildable on both platforms.
Once feasibility was confirmed, I walked our UX writer through the flows and we reviewed new copy each week. Search field placeholders, the empty state when no cities are saved, whether the header should read Weather or the selected city name. Copy was decided alongside the design, not filled in at the end.
05 · Solution
The redesign came down to making the city control impossible to miss, without losing the information people came for.
There was no version where the city name held contrast reliably, because the photo was never predictable. The tab became a white surface with the name in solid dark text. I gave up the atmosphere participants liked in The Weather Network, and I would rather it read every time than look alive most of the time.
The affordance people expected already existed in the category and CP24 technically had it. I gave it the strongest position on the screen, centred with a chevron beside it. That is the discoverable path and it works for a first-time user.
Solving a discoverability problem with an invisible gesture would be fair criticism if swipe were the only way through. It is not. The tappable header always works, and swipe is a shortcut for people who already know the app. A row of dots under the city name shows how many cities are saved and which one you are on, so the gesture becomes guessable rather than hidden.
06 · Impact
After the September 2024 launch I ran a benchmarking usability test comparing the old tab against the new one on the same tasks. Completion, time, and errors are measured across 10 task attempts per version. An error was any tap that did not move the task forward, such as opening the wrong menu or backtracking to try a different path.
Before
People hunted for a way to change cities, guessed, and backtracked.
After
A legible header and swipe between cities made the path obvious.
07 · Scale
CTV News was next in Bell Media's News Evolution sequence. It already had its own weather feature, but rather than redesign a second one, we brought this one across. Three pieces carried over.
Same structure, same hierarchy. Only the accent color changes.
Weather results sit in their own group above news, with a favorite control so a city can be saved from the results.
Weather there is context for local news rather than a destination, so it became a widget in the feed instead of a tab.
08 · Key Takeaways
The way to switch cities was on the screen every time. The problem was never the pattern, it was that people could not see it depending on the photo behind it. Naming that correctly kept the fix small instead of turning it into a redesign of something that already worked.
Adopting the city control people already knew from AccuWeather meant the design arrived with habits attached. That is also why it transferred cleanly into CTV News. A pattern validated on a live product with real users does not need to be re-argued on the next app.
The photo background gave the tab personality, but it could not guarantee the city name stayed legible. I gave up the atmosphere for a surface that reads correctly every time, and that trade is usually the difference between a concept and something that ships.