Reinventing Scubah's Diving App

Scubah is a cross-platform mobile application that automates dive tracking for scuba divers while allowing you to connect with fellow divers and subscribe to their activities.

The two co-founders of the project are strictly technical, so I led all branding and product design efforts for their team.

While there is a sea of diving apps on the market, the Scubah team found that even the most popular ones fall short of expectations.

After doing some competitive analysis, the main trends I noticed were:

Poor UI or UX

Too buggy or cluttered

Too technical

As part of my early competitive analysis, I dissected the weak points of Scubah's current app and its competitors using FigJam.

Through prior user interviews conducted by one of Scubah’s founders, we determined that divers primarily turn to diving apps to solve three pain points:

Sharing

Data Collection

Deals

After reviewing the notes from these interviews, I aggregated the findings into three user personas: The Newbie, The Steal Seeker, and the Data Master.

The primary aim during the exploration phase was to create an experience that was as unobtrusive and intuitive as possible, seeing there is no guarantee the end user can navigate a highly technical interface.

Your homepage would be a simple feed of your dives and those of your fellow divers. At the bottom would be a tab bar with links to browse dive sites, add dives, view your emergency kit, and go to your profile.

Several UI components would end up being revised as the feature set evolved. For example, a like/comment feature was added to the dive feed, which required a change in the card design.

High-fi exploration of a dive card for the main feed.

The final designs consisted of four main screens: the main feed, the user profile, a dive detail view, and the dive entry screen (accessible from the + icon in the nav bar).

Other screens, such as the tab for browsing dive sites, were started but never completed. Unfortunately, an unexpected personal matter came up on their end, causing the development of the product to halt for several months.

Development has since resumed, and I sincerely hope to one day continue collaborating with the founders to make their app the best diving app on the market.