The Garmin Marine division was making a late entrance into the app market. From competitive analysis, we determined that the major Garmin competitors already had an app presence and a dedicated following. Digital Cyclone, a subsidiary of Garmin, was given the task of creating the app, but while it's strength was in weather and mobile, this venture would be its first foray into the marine community.

To understand this new target audience, we dived into learning our competitor's apps, read marine industry blogs, followed marine bloggers as they wrote of their cruising adventures, conducted interviews, and created personas based on logistics available from Garmin marketing and business.

Taxonomy, Persona workshop, Task Analysis

Weekly design studios were held where members from the development team, business and QA were invited to participate and help plan the structure and interaction of the app features. From these meetings, we went on to iterate through paper prototypes, wireframes, full-fidelity mock-ups, and click-through prototypes.

design exploration

Since the development team was part of the design process, features were easily broken down into user stories and estimated for time and effort. When code was marked for internal review, code functionality AND the user experience were examined. We were able to catch not only bugs in the code, but also where interactions broke down.

Because the UX was so integrated in the development team, if time ran out for developing a feature, it was a simple matter of re-visiting the UX with the team and proposing an alternative plan of action.

Verify

ANCHORS AWEIGH

At the end of the development cycle, we conducted internal usability reviews of the app on phones and tablets. While using internal employees wasn't ideal, we made sure to gather a pool of participants that were not part of the app team and had a spectrum of experience with Garmin marine products and mobile in general. Key findings were then brought back to the team for immediate fixes or for future iterations.

After running our usability tests, we determined that future tests would need to be done after each key milestone to allow the developers more time to "fix" issues before release as well as to allow us to test deeper interactions. A final, summative usability study before a release could then test the overall experience.

Usability test

Results

SMOOTH SAILING

"The long awaited Garmin BlueChart app has finally hit the streets. We were teased with a few screen shots back in February and promised the app this past summer. Well it was worth the wait. Garmin took their own sweet time and did it right. ... This app also delivers with a ton of awesome features."
i-Marine Apps

In fact, anyone with a relatively current iPad, iPod Touch, or iPhone -- that is, one that's running iOS 6 or better -- can download the basic and free BlueChart app right now. And I think you should because I suspect that the app has value even if you don't go on to buy detailed charts ($30 for U.S. coastal) or the extra NEXRAD weather data (at just $4 it's nearly a no-brainer).
Ben Ellison (Panbo)