Like in many large companies, the first challenge was to sell the project internally. We started out by defining three project opportunities that all levels of the organization could relate to:

• Learn from how a niche app like this will enable content partnerships that is more worth than the usual yellow pages listings (integrating sales of boat insurance, loan funding, getting navigation certificate, boat service – and even boat competitions partnerships to mention a few).
• Transition from only offering a free app, to charging for a “pro version” with more features in the Sea Navigation app in AppStore and Google Play.

• Rather than building the brand through marketing initiatives, do it by creating a new valuable service in itself.
• Internally move money from the advertising budget to the IT budget to make the project happen

• Creating a service with features that will spark social sharing of Eniro data and hence drive sales of app as well as bring traffic to the Eniro website.
• Learn from use, and collect new data to make the Eniro services better over time.

To address the issue of code maintenance we early on decided together with the code team at Eniro to merge the code for the search engine from their “core app” with, with the flexibility of adapting the Sea Navigation design to the frontend of how searches would be performed and presented. As the core app was continuously being updated to work with all legacy systems and new features, we ensured that this app indirectly would always would be maintained.

To address the issue of code maintenance we early on decided together with the code team at Eniro to merge the code for the search engine from their “core app” with, with the flexibility of adapting the Sea Navigation design to the frontend of how searches would be performed and presented. As the core app was continuously being updated to work with all legacy systems and new features, we ensured that this app indirectly would always would be maintained.

The map licensing costs, are set differently for “just viewing sea maps” and for “navigating with the sea maps”, and this defined the two versions of the app: the free version and the pro version, where the costs for the free version would be covered by internal advertising budgets channeled to rather accompany this cost - as well as by income from the pro version, should the sales numbers get high

The first version of was designed back when Android penetration was close none, and before Apple introduced retina resolution and new aspect ratios to their screens. On top of that the user experience of the apps for the iPad and iPhone was very fragmented. To solve all these challenges at once, we designed a modular and scalable interface that streamlined the experience both between operating systems (while honoring differences such as the hardware back button on Android) and the ever increasing amount of screen resolutions, pixel densities and sizes.

A killer feature that we even have yet to see in other sea navigation apps.

Logging your position. Saving a picture of the position to your picture library just in case. And giving you a button to call for help - while presenting the position data that could save your life.

The light can change fast at sea. And you do not want to go blind by too intese light if you’re using the app by night.

Planning a trip and want to know what the weather will be like there? Just drop a pin and you’ll see.

The app was a success. Already after two weeks in the AppStore, the app had sold well enough to cover the cost the of all the work we had done on this project for Eniro, and then some.