One of the weirdly difficult decisions I ran into while building SkyFeels was deciding what the toolbar icon should show.
Temperature was obvious.
Then I added AQI.
Then UV.
And at some point I had the very predictable thought: why not show all of them?
Turns out that gets ugly pretty fast.
The toolbar is tiny
A Chrome toolbar icon is not a mini dashboard.
You have almost no space, and users are not going to stare at it for five seconds trying to decode three numbers, two colors, and a tiny symbol.
I tried thinking through a few versions where multiple values could fit in there.
Technically, sure, you can do it.
But every version made the icon less useful.
The whole point of putting weather in the toolbar is that I should be able to look at it for half a second and understand it.
If I have to stop and read it, I may as well open the extension.
Most of the time, I only care about one thing
This was the part that made the decision easier.
I rarely look at the weather and ask:
What’s the temperature, AQI, and UV right now?
Usually it is one question.
Is it hot?
Is the air bad?
Is the UV high?
So SkyFeels lets you choose one of those three for the toolbar.
Temperature, AQI, or UV.
One at a time.
The rest is still there when you click.
It sounds like a small product decision, but it ended up defining a lot of the UI.
The toolbar and popup shouldn't compete
Once I accepted that the toolbar should stay simple, the rest of the product became easier to reason about.
The toolbar is for the quick glance.
The popup is where the detail lives.
Current conditions, hourly forecast, multi-day forecast, air quality, UV, saved locations — that stuff makes sense once you actually open the extension.
Trying to push more of it into the toolbar just because it technically fits felt like the wrong direction.
I ended up coming back to the same idea over and over:
Weather at a glance, details when you need them.
Constraints are kind of useful
I used to think of small UI space mostly as a limitation.
Now I think it is also a filter.
When you only have a tiny area to work with, every piece of information has to earn its place.
There is no easy "let's add another card" option.
That has been useful beyond the toolbar too.
I find myself asking "does this need to be visible all the time?" much more often now.
A lot of things do not.
Feature lists are a trap
This is probably the bigger lesson for me.
It is very easy to compare your product with competitors and start counting features.
They have this.
They have that.
We should probably add it too.
That thinking never really ends.
The harder part is deciding what should stay out.
For the toolbar, I chose one metric.
Not because the other data is unimportant, but because showing everything at once would make the main interaction worse.
I may change my mind later. Maybe rotating metrics turns out to be useful. Maybe some users genuinely want two values at once.
Still testing it.
But right now, I would rather have one thing that is immediately readable than three things fighting for the same 16 pixels.
Disclosure: I build SkyFeels, the Chrome weather extension I’m talking about here.
Chrome Web Store:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/skyfeels-%E2%80%94-weather-toolba/dhkllljldghfpmedpbdiifdnbkbbngdk
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