SmartSail: Navigation for Recreational Sailors

Google maps is for cars. But what about boats? Sailors should already have the knowledge of our ancestral travelers ingrained into their knowledge base, right?

Most maritime navigation applications currently on the market are either very clunky and information dense, too complicated on the initial pass to warrant the user to even spend the time learning it. The apps that attempt to simplify this experience rely heavily on external equipment and attachments for tracking. Others are just boring: a digital map whose only concern is getting you from point A to B.

Sailing is rarely ever a non-social pastime. An extremely niche community should be able to have a dedicated space to share their hobby away—which is true for runners (STRAVA), hikers (AllTrails), etc.

Our mission with SmartSail was to envision a way to provide recreational sailors a safe, intuitive navigation system that simplifies route planning and enhances the sailing experience through real-time guidance and social features.

When planning the scope for this project, we always understood the undertaking to be a complete engineering monstrosity. This would be an idea that would require more than months to get right and a good-enough team to get started—two things our client simply did not have at the time. So we thought: how could design get us a closer to simplifying this larger vision?

Within a two-week timeline, I would create a design prototype that answered a few questions:

We also wanted to pay special attention to typical pain-points for an information rich application of this kind. This includes having a simplified onboarding experience by enabling quick account creation, only collecting the most necessary user and boat data. The interaction loops for core app functionality should also be quick to navigate to from within any state—we wanted the design to alive and meet the user where they are at.

The onboarding experience avoids the process of creating a typical profile with username and password in favor of a unique pin sent to the user's email for verification. The core of the experience relies on a database of boat information to reduce the cognitive load on the user.

A majority of the population are used to Google Maps for routing and short trip planning. In SmartSail's navigation, we follow the same patterns to create an experience that just makes sense—how to get a user from a starting positing to their desired end location, and anything else in between.

Weather conditions specific to time and location of the trip, which are overlayed on the panel prior to any trip.

SmartSail wants to make recreational sailing safe and easy to do for less experienced sailors. The identity of this first iteration is centered around safety and calmness that open-water travel with SmartSail should bring you.