We've taken the Voyatlas desktop web app offline. Over the coming months we're rebuilding Voyatlas from the ground up as a mobile app. This was not a decision we made lightly, and it came directly out of what we learned putting the product in front of real users.
What User Testing Told Us
Voyatlas has always been a desktop web app. That made sense when the product was primarily a research tool: a large interactive map, dense species data and detailed location breakdowns all benefit from a big screen. When we sat down with users, though, a consistent pattern emerged.
- People plan on desktop but travel with a phone. Testers happily researched a trip on a laptop, then had no way to bring any of it with them. The information they needed most was the information they could not access in the field.
- Sightings get logged in the moment or not at all. The journal feature we shipped in v1.5.0 assumed people would write entries up later. In practice, if it cannot be done from a boat or a beach within a few minutes of surfacing, it does not get done.
- Alerts only matter if they reach you. Wildlife sighting alerts are time sensitive. A notification that lands in a browser tab on a computer at home is not useful to someone standing on a dock deciding which trip to book.
- The desktop-only gate cost us users. A significant share of visitors arrived on a phone, hit the message telling them to come back on a computer and never returned.
None of these are problems we could solve by making the web app responsive. They are problems about where the product lives.
Why We're Rebuilding Rather Than Adapting
The obvious question is why we are not simply making voyatlas.io work on a small screen. The short answer is that the features we care most about going forward are ones a mobile app does well and a responsive website does poorly.
- Push notifications for wildlife sighting alerts, delivered to a lock screen rather than a browser tab.
- Camera access for species identification and journal photos captured on the spot.
- Location awareness so the map and alerts reflect where you actually are.
- Offline support for itineraries and location guides, which matters a great deal on a boat or a remote coastline with no signal.
Retrofitting these onto the existing codebase would have taken longer than starting clean and would have left us with a product that was compromised in both places. We would rather build one thing properly.
What Happens to the Web App
voyatlas.io is now offline. Everything that made it useful is coming to mobile: the interactive map, the tour and dive site database, species data and seasonality, location conditions, itineraries, journal entries, the community feed and sighting alerts. Nothing in the underlying data is going away.
voyatlas.com stays exactly where it is. The Explore section, destination guides and articles are unaffected and we'll keep publishing throughout the rebuild.
What's Next
We're heads down on the mobile build. Rather than commit to a date we're not confident in, we'll share progress as we go and open early access to the waitlist first. If you were using the web app, or you've been waiting for a version of Voyatlas you can actually take on a trip, the waitlist is the place to be.
Thank you to everyone who tested the web app and told us plainly what was not working. This change is a direct result of that feedback.
