FishMobi — Chris Karls

Fishing journal app

The essential gear for every angler's tackle box

Overview

FishMobi is an app I personally developed to journal fishing adventures, document key fishing hotspots and preserve outdoor memories. The adventure to self-fund and build the fishing app was born around a Minnesota camp fire, surrounded by my brothers enthusiastic bantor. In the spirit of my father’s old hunting journals, hand typed on what is now a vintage typewriter, Fishmobi takes journaling high-tech and in the palm of every angler’s hands. The essential gear for every angler’s tackle box.

FishMobi was featured on Minnesota Bound, a television series that explores the outdoors and activities in Minnesota.

My Role
Senior UX Designer, Inventor

Responsibilities
User Research, Product Strategy, Prototyping, Design User Flows, Visual Design, Interaction Design

Tools and Methods
Adobe Photoshop, Fishing

The Problem

Journaling is time consuming and important fishing information is lost

While fishing, you immediately understand that journaling on a fishing boat isn’t the ideal condition to be bringing a computer or journal to be documenting your fishing adventures. Before fishing went tech, it may sound crazy but a long-time friend actually brought his laptop in the boat to ensure he captured key information. It turns out he wasn’t the only one who could benefit from a mobile app to automate and document key information about their fishing trips.

Now fish finders have certainly been able to help find and map key fishing spots, but don’t gather all the information needed to journal. Not to mention that fish finder data, until recently, only exists on the boat your fishing on. To really document your catches and fishing memories, key data including weather, lunar cycles, type of fish, fish size, bait, photo, general notes and obviously geolocation to pin-point your location is essential to help you become a better angler.

The Goal

Automate key data gathering to make journaling easy and preserve outdoor memories

An important fact that was evident early on from interviews and personal experience, when an angler is in the boat enjoying the moment, journaling should be easy so you can actually fish and not waste precious fishing time.

The goal was to allow angler’s to document the catch in under two minutes. The idea of having an “easy button” for the fishing experience never was more true. With one tap, the app would get all weather, lunar and geolocation data quickly from cellular and 3rd party integrations. The user experience would easily store catch information and step you through the most important journaling information and allow for further personalization when time permitted.

Research

User interviews

As an early adopter to new technology, with the iPhone in its infancy stage, iOS fishing apps were non-existent at the time. In my research, I interviewed over 10 avid anglers and friends to help understand the following:

How do they currently preserve their fishing memories, fishing hotspots and journal their fishing trips?
What information would be key to document important fishing data that could help make them a better angler?
More importantly, how would they feel about using a mobile fishing app while in the boat or on their fishing trips.

Key findings

Anglers expressed interest in a fishing app and validated key findings that would make FishMobi successful:

FishMobi App not a distraction
The user experience must be really easy and intuitive. Fishing is often an escape from their daily lives and a way to disconnect from technology. FishMobi must add to the overall fishing experience not distract.

Automate data gathering
When fishing, especially on a boat, safety is a key issue so using a mobile app to document fishing hotspots needs to be quick and easy. A common phrase “I got one" became the easy button to start the journaling rallying cry and data gathering moment.

Personalization
Journaling is more than recording important data regarding the catch, it’s personal. Notes and photos would be an essential part for recording the moment, who you were fishing with and capturing the fun conversations had while enjoying the outdoors.

“I got one”

Two-minute catch scenario

Building off my research, I developed fishing personas and utilized scenario maps to uncover product features for key touchpoints, helping understand what personas would do, think and feel while using the app after catching a fish.

My television debut

FishMobi featured on Minnesota Bound

FishMobi was featured on Minnesota Bound, a television series that explores the outdoors and activities in Minnesota. An app I personally developed to journal fishing adventures, document key fishing hotspots and preserve outdoor memories.

Product Design

Prototype Screens