Tidepool
2026A field app that lets marine biologists log samples offline on a research boat and sync them when the signal comes back.
Product designer & writer · Gothenburg, Sweden
I design tools for people who work with data, and I write about how they get made.
Available for new projects from January 2027.
01 Selected work
Case studies
Four recent projects, from a boat in the Skagerrak to the back office of a credit union.
Ledger rewrite
2025Replacing a 20-year-old member banking system for a community credit union without losing a single edge case staff relied on.
Delay map
2025A live map of tram and bus delays that gives commuters a quick answer and dispatchers the full picture.
Open Data Handbook
2024A free, plain-language guide that walks municipalities through publishing their first datasets, from spreadsheet to portal.
02 Writing
Notes from the work
Showing all 6 posts
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What a tide table taught me about empty statesLatest
A printed tide table is never blank, and it changed how I design the moment before data arrives.
Read it belowDesign7 min read -
Designing for gloves: touch targets in the field
What I learned watching biologists tap a tablet with wet neoprene fingers on a rolling deck.
Field notes5 min read -
Notes from rebuilding a 20-year-old banking form
Two decades of edge cases lived in one screen, and we had to find every one of them before we could replace it.
Design9 min read -
Why I stopped using pie charts in client reports
Clients kept misreading them, so I swapped every pie for a sorted bar chart and the questions in meetings got better.
Data4 min read -
A month of sketching on the tram
Thirty days, one pocket notebook and line 11, plus what I noticed about how people actually read departure boards.
Field notes6 min read -
Pricing freelance work by the problem, not the hour
Hourly rates punished me for getting faster, and pricing the problem instead made scoping conversations more honest.
Freelancing8 min read
What a tide table taught me about empty states
On the second morning of fieldwork for Tidepool, somewhere off the coast near Lysekil, the ship’s mate handed me a folded paper tide table. It had no loading spinner. No “nothing here yet” message. No illustration of a sad, empty box. It simply listed the tides for the whole year, printed months before anyone needed them.
That little booklet changed how I think about empty states.
An empty state is a promise
Most software treats the moment before data arrives as an awkward gap, and fills it with an apology. But the biologists on that boat weren’t waiting for nothing. They were waiting for something specific: the next sample, the next sync, the next low tide. The tide table answered that question before anyone asked it.
So we stopped designing empty screens. In Tidepool, every view that could be empty now shows what is expected to arrive, and when. A sampling station with no readings shows its planned schedule. An upload queue with nothing in it shows the last successful sync and the next window when the vessel is likely to have signal.
An empty screen should tell you what will be here, not apologize that nothing is.
Expected data is still data
The catch is that expected has to be a real state in the data model, not a design flourish. Here is a simplified version of the station record we ended up with:
station: VS-04 Gullmarsfjorden
state: expected
next: 2026-06-14 05:40 # low tide, 0.21 m
last: 2026-06-13 17:52 # synced over 4GOnce the expected state existed in the data, the interface could be honest without anyone writing cheerful filler copy. The content was already there; we just had to stop hiding it.
What changed
Two things surprised me. Questions to the support channel about “missing” readings fell by more than half in the first month, because people could see that nothing was missing, only not yet due. And the screens we used to call empty became some of the most visited in the app. Crews opened them in the harbour each morning to plan their day.
A tide table is a humble object. But it treats the future as content, and it is still the best empty state I have ever seen.
04 About
Hej, I’m Maya
Maya Lindqvist
Independent product designer, Gothenburg
I’m a product designer and writer based in Gothenburg. For the past seven years I’ve designed software for people whose work depends on data: marine biologists logging samples at sea, credit union staff moving members between systems, dispatchers watching a whole city’s trams in real time.
I care most about the unglamorous parts, like forms, empty states, error messages and the moment a chart is either understood or misread. I prototype in code because real data rarely behaves the way a mockup expects. Today I take on a few projects a year, run workshops for teams, and write about what I learn along the way, usually on the tram.
Experience
- 2019 – 2021Designer, Kartverk Studio
- 2021 – 2024Senior product designer, Norrsken Analytics
- 2024 – nowIndependent
Skills
- Interaction design
- Information design
- Prototyping in code
- Design systems
- Workshop facilitation
Talks
- Empty states are contentNordic Design Days2026
- Forms that survive a migrationFront-end Gothenburg2025
05 Contact
Working on something with a lot of data?
Tell me about the people who use it and what’s getting in their way. I reply within two working days.
maya@lindqvist.example