Tidepool
A field app that lets marine biologists log samples on a boat with no signal and syncs everything once they are back in the harbour.
Maya Lindqvist
I design tools for people who work with data, and I write about how they get made.
Available for new projects from January 2027.
Selected work
Four projects from 2024 to 2026, used on a boat deck, at a bank counter, at a tram stop and in a town hall.
Ledger rewrite
Replacing a 20-year-old member banking system for a community credit union without losing a single rule its staff relied on.
Delay map
A live map of tram and bus delays that commuters read at the stop and dispatchers keep open all day.
Open Data Handbook
A free guide that walks municipalities through publishing their first datasets, from choosing one to keeping it up to date.
Writing
Six posts from 2026.
-
Design7 min
What a tide table taught me about empty states
A sensor on a harbour wall went quiet, and a two-word message sent a research team the wrong way.
-
Field notes5 min
Designing for gloves: touch targets in the field
Wet neoprene, a rolling deck and a 44-pixel button: what I measured during the Tidepool field trials.
-
Design9 min
Notes from rebuilding a 20-year-old banking form
The old change-of-address screen had 31 fields and three rules nobody had written down. This is how we found them.
-
Data4 min
Why I stopped using pie charts in client reports
Clients kept asking which slice was bigger, and a sorted bar chart answers that before anyone has to ask.
-
Field notes6 min
A month of sketching on the tram
Thirty mornings between Majorna and Brunnsparken, one sketchbook, and what riders read on a delay screen.
-
Freelancing8 min
Pricing freelance work by the problem, not the hour
Hourly rates reward slow work, so I scope a fixed price around the problem a client actually has.
What a tide table taught me about empty states
Last autumn I spent three days on a research boat in the Koster fjord with the team from the Nordic Ocean Institute. They were testing Tidepool, the field app we had built for them, and I was there to watch where it broke. It broke somewhere I had not designed at all: the tide table.
On the Swedish west coast the tide is a matter of centimetres. Wind and air pressure move the water more than the moon does, so the biologists check the gauge readings before every dive. Our table pulled those readings from a sensor on the harbour wall. When the sensor went quiet, the table showed two words: “No data.”
Blank is a message too
Nobody on deck read “No data” as a neutral statement. One researcher took it to mean the app was broken and restarted it twice. Another took it to mean the water was calm, and planned a sample run around it. The empty state was the most-read screen of the day, and it said nothing true.
An empty state is the screen people see at the exact moment they most need help.
Here is what the sync log actually held for that Wednesday morning:
station,time,level_cm,status
torshamnen,02:50,+14,ok
torshamnen,03:10, ,offline
torshamnen,15:40, ,offline
torshamnen,16:00,+9,okThat is not an absence of data. It says when the gap started, when it ended, and what the water was doing on either side. Every part of it is useful to someone standing on a deck.
What we shipped instead
The new empty state answers three questions in plain sentences: what is missing, why, and what to do meanwhile. It names the gauge and the hours it was offline. It shows the predicted tide in a lighter tone, labelled as a prediction. And it says when the next reading is due, so nobody restarts the app to check.
None of this needed new engineering. The information was already in the log; we had simply decided, without noticing, that an empty table was not worth writing. Now I start every project by listing the screens that will be empty on day one, and I write those first. They are usually the ones people remember.
About
I’m Maya Lindqvist, a product designer and writer based in Gothenburg. I spent five years at Kartverk Studio and Norrsken Analytics designing maps, dashboards and the forms behind them. Since 2024 I have worked independently for research institutes, transit agencies, a credit union and city governments. My work starts where the data is messiest: offline sync, records older than the staff who use them, live feeds that drop out. I prototype in code so clients can test with their own numbers in the first weeks, and I run workshops that put engineers, analysts and the people who use the tool every day in one room. I write about all of it here, and once a month in Field Notes. Tell me about your project.
Experience
-
2024 to nowIndependent
-
2021 to 2024Senior product designer, Norrsken Analytics
-
2019 to 2021Designer, Kartverk Studio
Skills
- Interaction design
- Information design
- Prototyping in code
- Design systems
- Workshop facilitation
Talks
- Empty states are contentNordic Design Days, 2026
- Forms that survive a migrationFront-end Gothenburg, 2025
Once a month: one problem from a current project, one chart I would redraw, and what I’m reading.
The next issue goes out on 1 November. Every issue has a one-click unsubscribe link.
Field Notes
A monthly email about designing with data. 1,900 readers.
Contact
Write about a tool, a dataset or a talk you would like me to give. I reply within two working days.