Tidepool
Lead designer
A field app for marine biologists that keeps logging samples, tides and positions when the boat is hours from the nearest signal.
Product designer & writer
I design tools for people who work with data, and I write about how they get made.
01 · Selected work
Selected work
Four projects from the last three years, from research vessels to municipal open data.
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Ledger rewrite
Product designer
Replacing a 20-year-old member banking system for a community credit union without losing the workarounds staff had come to depend on.
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Delay map
Design and front-end
A live map of tram and bus delays that gives commuters a quick answer and gives dispatchers the full picture of the network.
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Open Data Handbook
Author and designer
A free, plain-language guide that walks municipal staff through choosing, cleaning and publishing their first open datasets.
02 · Writing
Writing
Notes on design, data and running a one-person studio. A new post roughly every three weeks.
Showing all 6 posts
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What a tide table taught me about empty statesFeatured · read below
A grey box that said “No data available” taught a boat full of biologists to stop trusting our app, and rebuilding it changed how I design for missing data.
7 min readDesign -
Designing for gloves: touch targets in the field
Wet neoprene and a rolling deck make a 44-pixel button hard to hit, so we tested every Tidepool screen with gloves on.
5 min readField notes -
Notes from rebuilding a 20-year-old banking form
The old member form had 112 fields and two decades of workarounds, and keeping the workarounds mattered more than cutting the fields.
9 min readDesign -
Why I stopped using pie charts in client reports
Clients kept misreading the slices, so I switched to sorted bar charts, and the follow-up emails asking “so which one is bigger?” stopped.
4 min readData -
A month of sketching on the tram
Thirty days of drawing fellow commuters on line 6 changed how I think about waiting, and about what the Delay map should show first.
6 min readField notes -
Pricing freelance work by the problem, not the hour
Hourly rates penalise you for getting faster, so here is how I scope and price work around the problem a client needs solved.
8 min readFreelancing
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03 · Featured post
What a tide table taught me about empty states
Last spring I spent three weeks on a research vessel off the coast of Bohuslän, watching marine biologists use the first prototype of Tidepool. The app mostly worked. The screens I was proudest of mostly did not.
The one that failed worst was the tide table. On a good day it showed the next four tide turns for the station nearest the boat. On a bad day, with no signal, a stale cache, or a station that had stopped reporting, it showed a grey box that said No data available. Every researcher who saw that box did the same thing: they put the phone in their pocket and asked the skipper.
Empty is not the same as nothing
“No data available” is technically true and practically useless. It doesn’t say whether the data is missing, late, or never existed. It doesn’t say what to do next. And on a boat, where the next sync could be hours away, it quietly tells people to stop trusting the app.
So we stopped treating the empty state as an error and started treating it as content. We asked a simple question: what do we actually know when we don’t have fresh data? Quite a lot, it turned out. We knew when the last reading arrived. We knew the predicted tides from the harmonic model, which doesn’t need a connection. We knew which station was next nearest.
The new tide card shows all of it:
station Smögen (SMG)
last sync 04:12 · 6 h 40 min ago
next high 11:48 +0.31 m predicted
next low 17:55 −0.22 m predicted
fallback Kungsvik (KVK) · 14 kmPredicted values get a dashed underline and the word “predicted” written out, so the meaning never depends on colour alone. The time of the last sync is always visible, never hidden behind a tap.
An empty state is where your product admits what it doesn’t know. That honesty is part of the design, not a gap in it.
What changed on the boat
On the second trip, nobody put their phone away at the tide card. One researcher told me she preferred the stale-data screen to the live one, because it told her exactly how much to trust it. That is now the standard I hold every empty state to: it should say what’s missing, why, what we still know, and what you can do about it.
Most products have dozens of these screens, and most of them get written last, by whoever happens to pick up the ticket. They deserve better, because they are often what people see when the stakes are highest.
Filed under Design · Tidepool
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04 · About
About
Maya LindqvistIndependent product designer, Gothenburg
I’m a product designer and writer based in Gothenburg. For the past seven years I’ve worked on software for people whose jobs depend on data: researchers, dispatchers, bank clerks and municipal analysts. I started out drawing maps at Kartverk Studio, spent three years building analytics tools at Norrsken Analytics, and went independent in 2024 to work more closely with the people who use what I design. I usually join a project early, while the problem is still fuzzy, and stay until the first version ships. I prototype in code, run workshops with the people doing the work, and write things down as I go. When I’m not working, I’m usually on a tram with a sketchbook or out on the water in the archipelago.
Experience
- 2019 to 2021Designer, Kartverk Studio
- 2021 to 2024Senior product designer, Norrsken Analytics
- 2024 to nowIndependent
Skills
- Interaction design
- Information design
- Prototyping in code
- Design systems
- Workshop facilitation
Talks
- “Empty states are content”Nordic Design Days2026
- “Forms that survive a migration”Front-end Gothenburg2025
05 · Contact
Have a tool that needs to make sense of data?
I’m booking projects that start in January 2027 or later. Tell me a little about the people who’ll use what we make, and I’ll reply within two working days.
maya@lindqvist.example