Student doing research - need quick help

[Didka77]

Hello divers! I'm a UX Design student and will be developing a weather app catering specifically to divers for my course project. Right now I'm doing user research about how divers and other water sports enthusiasts use weather apps and what is missing from current ones. I would much appreciate your help if you have 3 minutes to fill out my survey:
https://forms.gle/yKTGaTMxVnUU2FKZ9

My husband is a scuba diver and I've been on a few trips with him. I'd love to become a scuba diver as well but discovered that I get severe sea sickness on the boat. So if you have tips about that, I'll be glad to hear them.

 

[Jay Adams]

Shore diving. no motion sickness from the boat

 

[oly5050user]

Hello divers! I'm a UX Design student and will be developing a weather app catering specifically to divers for my course project. Right now I'm doing user research about how divers and other water sports enthusiasts use weather apps and what is missing from current ones. I would much appreciate your help if you have 3 minutes to fill out my survey:
https://forms.gle/yKTGaTMxVnUU2FKZ9

My husband is a scuba diver and I've been on a few trips with him. I'd love to become a scuba diver as well but discovered that I get severe sea sickness on the boat. So if you have tips about that, I'll be glad to hear them.

No need to step foot on a boat. Can meet all requirements for certification and never get on a boat. After pool requirements do training certification dives in a lake/ quarry environment. For ocean try Bonaire, can dive multiple times a day never get on a boat.

 

[Ghost95]

Being divers we have to look at more than just sun or rain as I'm sure you've noticed. I would add something that adds tides and currents into the mix. Maybe with a forecast function that scrolls hour by hour correlating best time to dive with currents, sun, wave height and period, and maybe temperature. It would probably require allot of data and local knowledge for certain sites though.

You would have to know what the best tide was for a local area, on the high, an hour before high, an hour after low, whatever the case may be. If you could get that info you could have a pretty cool forecasting tool for divers. Once you got one formula for a certain spot or spots, you could probably just modify the data for other sites.

Basically the forecast could read something like:

Spot "A" will have good tides at 0900 on saturday morning. It's supposed to be sunny, 85º, with a 2' swell at 12 seconds.
Forecast = 5 stars, green, thumbs up, or some other qualifier.

I'd love to see water visibility forecast in there too but I have no idea how you would even get a grip on forecasting that.

Sounds like an interesting project. Good luck. Keep us informed.

 

[kelemvor]

My husband is a scuba diver and I've been on a few trips with him. I'd love to become a scuba diver as well but discovered that I get severe sea sickness on the boat. So if you have tips about that, I'll be glad to hear them.

Go out only on days when the sea is calm. Take meclizine. Don't drink the day before a dive. Make sure you're hydrated and rested. Watch the horizon at all times while on the boat.

And/or shore dive. Spring diving can be pretty fun even if you're not a cave diver. Up north people dive in quarries, which I understand can be fun.

 

[Didka77]

Thank you guys for your helpful suggestions. I think the way for me is shore diving, since the medication didn't help. Also thank you so much for those who helped me with my survey!

 

[Didka77]

Being divers we have to look at more than just sun or rain as I'm sure you've noticed. I would add something that adds tides and currents into the mix. Maybe with a forecast function that scrolls hour by hour correlating best time to dive with currents, sun, wave height and period, and maybe temperature. It would probably require allot of data and local knowledge for certain sites though.

You would have to know what the best tide was for a local area, on the high, an hour before high, an hour after low, whatever the case may be. If you could get that info you could have a pretty cool forecasting tool for divers. Once you got one formula for a certain spot or spots, you could probably just modify the data for other sites.

Basically the forecast could read something like:

Spot "A" will have good tides at 0900 on saturday morning. It's supposed to be sunny, 85º, with a 2' swell at 12 seconds.
Forecast = 5 stars, green, thumbs up, or some other qualifier.

I'd love to see water visibility forecast in there too but I have no idea how you would even get a grip on forecasting that.

Sounds like an interesting project. Good luck. Keep us informed.

Your comment is very insightful and I'd like to use your ideas for my project. Another person also shared (in an interview) that the rating is something that they would find helpful, so I will be pursuing that direction. I can post my prototype and then can share my more refined design in a few months.

 

[Zef]

A year or two ago someone else asked for help with something similar and they used the feedback they recieved to develop an app available in the google play store called Dive Site Overwatch.

Perhaps you could download and check that out as to give you some ideas of what exists and can be improved upon, especially from a data and or user interface standpoint with regards to what you are looking to develop.

-Z

 

[Didka77]

A year or two ago someone else asked for help with something similar and they used the feedback they recieved to develop an app available in the google play store called Dive Site Overwatch.

Perhaps you could download and check that out as to give you some ideas of what exists and can be improved upon, especially from a data and or user interface standpoint with regards to what you are looking to develop.

-Z

Thanks for the tip! I found it and am downloading it to explore and learn from it.

 

[Esprise Me]

Being divers we have to look at more than just sun or rain as I'm sure you've noticed. I would add something that adds tides and currents into the mix. Maybe with a forecast function that scrolls hour by hour correlating best time to dive with currents, sun, wave height and period, and maybe temperature. It would probably require allot of data and local knowledge for certain sites though.

You would have to know what the best tide was for a local area, on the high, an hour before high, an hour after low, whatever the case may be. If you could get that info you could have a pretty cool forecasting tool for divers. Once you got one formula for a certain spot or spots, you could probably just modify the data for other sites.

Basically the forecast could read something like:

Spot "A" will have good tides at 0900 on saturday morning. It's supposed to be sunny, 85º, with a 2' swell at 12 seconds.
Forecast = 5 stars, green, thumbs up, or some other qualifier.

I'd love to see water visibility forecast in there too but I have no idea how you would even get a grip on forecasting that.

Sounds like an interesting project. Good luck. Keep us informed.

+1 to all this.

There's lots of data out there on weather and swell forecasts, but putting it all together in a way that's meaningful can be challenging. The relevance of various factors depends on location. I do most of my diving in SoCal, where tides don't make a huge difference. I've been looking into the possibility of diving at Whidbey Island in Washington (might take a family vacation up there at some point) and I've leaned that tides are not a thing you can ignore up there! As another example, mainland SoCal counties typically issue a 3-day rain advisory (urging divers etc. to stay out of the ocean) after a rainfall. But you can generally safely dive from a boat during this time, or at Catalina Island (20+ miles off the coast, accessible via ferry.) Also, we're lucky to have beaches facing different directions, so if the south swell makes Laguna undiveable, you can go up to Redondo or down to La Jolla. It would be really cool if someone could teach an AI program to make recommendations about where and how to dive, based on this kind of local knowledge, weather and wave reports, and a user's input about their own comfort level with various factors (e.g. I'm cool with low viz after a storm passes, but get nervous about big waves when a storm is coming in.)