20Society Audience Perceptions of an Interactive Version of the SPC Convective Outlook

User-centered design strategies are often incorporated into product development because they can improve the design and evaluation of complex interfaces, especially for web mapping applications. In the 2024 Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) focus groups, we asked emergency managers and broadcast meteorologists to interact with and provide feedback on an experimental SPC product viewer, a prototype interactive outlook communication tool developed collaboratively between the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) and the OU Institute for Public Policy Research & Analysis (IPPRA). The viewer incorporated a number of product innovations in one interface, such as the ability to zoom in and out of the forecast map, view new graphics that displayed conditional intensity and continuous probabilities. Participants were also able to access new timing graphics in the viewer that can display when storms are most likely to occur at a given location, including both a 4-hour sliding forecast graphic and a pop-up line graph presenting threat likelihood over time at a point. A similar version of the interactive outlook was also presented to members of the public within the 2024 Severe Weather and Society Survey. Results from quantitative and qualitative feedback offered during the experiment, as well as public survey data, will be presented. As interactive products are increasingly requested by a wide variety of audiences, it is important to systematically gather views and interpretations of products before they are made operational.