Coastal Watch
Finding the perfect swell has long been the past time of Aussie surfers. VERSA teamed up with CoastalWatch to create a voice experience that uses APIs to find the gnarliest swell near you. Shaka.
Creative & Strategy
Tracking the swell with voice
Working closely with CoastalWatch meant VERSA’s conversational strategy was informed by the experts for a community of surfers who frequent our beaches from St Kilda to Surfer's paradise.
We look at key principles in the surfer's decision-making process, looking at environmental factors like wind, direction, and swell. Once we had the conversational logic that would drive the experience we could begin designing it. Yew!
Design & Innovation
Design around real user behaviour
During conversational design, we wanted to make the experience as flexible as possible for users.
Features we included; a surfer can save their favourite surf spots for the conversation to remember to pick up on next time. Users can get long-form information over the next three days to plan a surf trip, or just find out today's surf conditions to see if it’s worth heading down after work.
Technology & Development
Integrating with existing APIs
The experience pulls live data from a range of CoastalWatch’s API’s. Including information on the swell, wind, conditions, weather warnings and much more. This is combined into a short-hand voice briefing which gives the information in an audio-friendly way.
Through multimodal screens, there’s the potential to expand this data to live stream video content from specific beaches.
