As a surfer, designing a surf reporting app was always on my radar, so I did just that! My concept app 'SwellWatch' is quite heavily influenced by the magicseaweeed app. It's pretty great, I use it all the time. However, I still wanted to lightly redesign the surf reporting experience while addressing a few main issues with surf reporting apps that I've encountered:
- Lack of personalisation, other than being able to favourite spots and some light localisation.
- Removing other noise in the app, such as surfing news and articles
- Inaccurate reports that don't take into account the nuances of certain surf spots
- Inaccessible search functionality
I also wanted to make it a bit more of a personalised experience, with users able to perform actions like:
- Set a 'local' spot, with the ability to set other 'favourite' spots
- Review & rate surf spots
- See other surfer's reviews & ratings
- Read an AI surf report insight that predicts the swell size, direction, period and quality, wind direction and strength, and best time to surf.
A few more features that could also be of benefit to the app:
- Allow/encourage users to give feedback on the accuracy of the reports they're receiving to enhance the AI model's accuracy.
- Download reports for offline access at a later stage. You'll often have poor connection when you're out and about near the coast!
- Social > Log your surf sessions, see your friends' sessions and plan sessions with them. Perhaps enabling integrations with exercise tracker apps such as Strava, Garmin & Apple Fitness would allow users to log their sessions to the app.
I'm still working on designing the app & refining existing screens. So if you check back later, you'll likely see more here, including more areas of the app and an interactive prototype. Also, to call out, I'd consider this primarily a 'product design' project. There were undoubtedly UX considerations for things like IA, content & microcopy, interactions & accessibility, but there hasn't been any user research or testing done to this point other than anecdotal comments from fellow surfers over the years!
