Tidepool
A field app that lets marine biologists log samples, tides and sightings offline on a boat, then syncs everything once they're back in harbour.
RoleLead designer
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.
Illustrative tide curve · Gothenburg harbour
57.71° N, 11.97° E
01 · Selected work
Software for boats, banks, trams and town halls
Four recent projects where people depend on the data in front of them, often in places where that's harder than it should be.
Ledger rewrite
Replacing a 20-year-old member banking system for a community credit union with forms that staff and members can finish without calling for help.
RoleProduct designer
Delay map
A live map of tram and bus delays that gives commuters a straight answer and gives dispatchers an early warning.
RoleDesign and front-end
Open Data Handbook
A free guide that walks municipalities through publishing their first datasets, from the spreadsheet on someone's desktop to a public portal.
RoleAuthor and designer
02 · Writing
Notes from the work
Essays on design, data and running a one-person studio, written while the projects are still fresh.
Showing all 6 posts
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What a tide table taught me about empty states
The quietest screen in Tidepool turned out to be the one researchers looked at most, and it changed how I design for "no data yet".
Featured · Read it below ↓Design7 min read -
Designing for gloves: touch targets in the field
Wet neoprene, cold fingers and a rolling deck showed me how little our neat 44-pixel targets were worth out on the water.
Field notes5 min read -
Notes from rebuilding a 20-year-old banking form
Every odd field in the old system was a workaround someone still relied on, so we treated the form as an archive before treating it as a design problem.
Design9 min read -
Why I stopped using pie charts in client reports
Clients kept arguing about the slices instead of the numbers, so I switched to sorted bars and one plain sentence per chart.
Data4 min read -
A month of sketching on the tram
Thirty mornings with a pocket sketchbook on Line 6 taught me more about how commuters read delays than any interview did.
Field notes6 min read -
Pricing freelance work by the problem, not the hour
Hourly rates reward slow work and penalise experience, so I now quote for the problem we're solving and the risk I'm taking on with the client.
Freelancing8 min read
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- Published
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- Filed under
- Design · Tidepool
Featured post
What a tide table taught me about empty states
For the first two weeks of the Tidepool project, I designed the wrong screen. I had mocked up a busy, satisfying sample log: species counts, coordinates, photos, a neat sync indicator. Then I went out on the Nordic Ocean Institute's survey boat and watched what the biologists actually looked at. It was the screen I had barely designed at all, the one that said nothing had been logged yet.
Out at a sampling station, nobody starts with data. They start by waiting: for the boat to settle, for the tide to turn, for the right depth. The empty log stayed open for twenty minutes at a time, and all it offered was a grey illustration and the words "No samples yet."
The tide table was already the answer
Taped to the wheelhouse wall was a printed tide table. Every researcher checked it before every drop. It had no data for this station yet, but it told them what to expect: when the water would be high, when it would be slack, and how long they had.
That's what a good empty state does. It isn't an apology for missing content. It is content: the most useful thing you can tell someone before the real work begins.
An empty state is the first page of the story, not a blank one.
What we changed
We replaced the illustration with three things the crew already wanted: the next tide turn, the last synced sample from this station, and a checklist for the drop. All of it is cached on the device, so it works with no signal twelve nautical miles out. The data behind it is small enough to fit in a text message:
station GBG-07
next_turn 14:52 low 0.31 m
last_sync 2026-09-18 12 samples
checklist 3 of 5 done
offline trueWithin a week the empty screen had a new nickname on board: the briefing. People started opening it on purpose before they reached a station, to plan the drop.
Three questions I ask now
When I design an empty state now, I ask three questions. What does this person know before there is any data? What will they need in the next five minutes? And what would they otherwise have to look up somewhere else, on a wall, in a notebook, or by asking a colleague?
If the answer to the last one is "a tide table taped to the wall", that's your empty state. Design it as if it's the most-used screen in the app, because it might be.
03 · About
Hello, I'm Maya
I'm a product designer and writer based in Gothenburg. I make software for people whose days are shaped by data: researchers on boats, credit union staff, transit dispatchers, and the civil servants who publish the datasets everyone else relies on.
I started at Kartverk Studio drawing maps and wayfinding, then spent three years at Norrsken Analytics designing dashboards people actually opened. Since 2024 I've worked independently, usually as the only designer on a small team. I prototype in code, I spend the first week of a project watching people work, and I write about what I learn so the next project starts a little smarter. Most weekends you'll find me on a ferry to the archipelago with a sketchbook.
Gothenburg, Sweden
Working in English and Swedish
Working in English and Swedish
Experience
- 2024 – nowIndependentDesign and writing studio of one
- 2021 – 2024Senior product designerNorrsken Analytics
- 2019 – 2021DesignerKartverk Studio
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
04 · Contact
Have a tool that needs to make sense of data?
Tell me about the people who will use it and where they'll be when they do. I usually reply within two working days.