Starboard Sail
An iOS app for avid sailors, which helps connect boat owners and crew to compete in regattas.
Role: UX Design, Visual Design, Design System
Year: August 2021
Client: Starboard Sail
Platform: iOS
Background
There is no modern product in the market to help connect boat owners with crew to compete in or join regattas. The current methods of connect are often Excel or Google spreadsheets and WhatsApp groups. In order to find a regatta and see scores, many of the websites are hard to parse and have not been updated since the early 2000’s.
My client, an avid sailor, came to me with fully baked wireframes and a strong vision on what he and his target audience needed from a mobile app. Over many working sessions and small research groups of peers, we developed an MVP experience that filled many unmet needs in the marketplace.
How might we
Create an app experience that helps boat owners and crew connect for regattas, monitor their progress and improve their skills over time?
Style Guide
Color palette
For the color palette, I wanted something reminiscent of the ocean. I chose a primarily blue core palette which includes a light, medium and dark shade, as well as grayscale swatches with strong blue undertones for UI.
Typography
For typography, the client wanted something simple, elegant and highly readable as the app would be used while out sailing. After a few rounds of type exploration, we selected Jost for it’s variety of weights and clean lines.
Final Screens
Dashboard
View weather conditions, pending crew invitations, upcoming regattas, sailing and top stats and boat to-do list.
Goals
Add and track goals both big and small. Create an action plan on how to achieve them.
Regattas
Search and filter all regattas, view all open regattas, joined and past. Create your own regattas and find crew to join.
Plan, Set, Review
Everything you need to plan for your upcoming regatta and document the outcome to reference for future events.
Chat
Chat with and message crew.
Boats & Profile
Manage your boats and personal profile.
Reflection
Ideally, I would participate in the end to end process including ideating, wireframing. and research. Due to limited time and budget, the client came to me with fully fleshed out concept that needed to be refined and fleshed out at. a higher fidelity.
Had there been more time, I would have liked to redo the wires at a low-fidelity first before jumping into high fidelity designs. We ended up having a lot of working sessions to continue iterating on the UX and doing so at a higher fidelity can be more time consuming with more throw away work. I also would have liked to conduct qualitative research sessions myself vs. getting second hand feedback from the client.