Spotify collaborated with AccuWeather to undertake a study that on how the weather affects what you listen to, wherever you are. This year-long effort combined the data from both companies to compare 85 billion anonymized streams on Spotify in over 900 cities nationwide.

Our idea was to create an experience that brought this to life - using your location data to serve you the perfect playlist for your current weather condition. And because talking about the weather can feel dull, a playful interface offers little games to play while saving your playlist.

These “webtoys” represent the six major weather states and allowed us to break out of the conventional way of presenting weather data.

We started by defining the 6 web toys (Sun, Cloudy, Snow, Rain, Clear Night) and then mapped all the various weather combinations back to these defined states. By analyzing the data and the ranges presented within the data set, we set thresholds for each web toy to trigger various events. Throughout development, we discovered minor edge cases such as what happens when it is sunny and windy at the same time, or what do we do when the weather location reported is different from our listening data. Throughout development, the team addressed each edge case, ensuring the experience at the end would not be confusing for our user.

From creative idea to launch, the process took about 16 weeks, that were broken into one-week sprints. Along the way the following technologies were employed: CreateJS,Three.js, Node.js, WebGL, Nginx.