Beachwatch Website and App Redevelopment

Along with ensuring the site could expand over time to cover the entire NSW seaboard and inland swimming areas, the Beachwatch website needed a series of usability improvements including decluttering information, improving navigation, prioritising user-related display preferences, ensuring timely forecasting, improving data visualisation and exploring map interactivity. Improvements were needed to better capture externally provided data (e.g. from the Bureau of Meteorology) on daily rainfall, warnings, swimming site parameters, to lessen the risk of human error and reduce “double-handling”. There was also a need to replace manually intensive data entry tasks with automatic, real-time date-stamped records.

Design improvements and map interactions were co-designed and then tested with end users. The depth of research completed across the project helped to understand the foundations of what customers and stakeholders needed from the Beachwatch website, and the result has been transformative. The program now boasts a more streamlined and user-friendly interface, and users are immediately presented with a single spacial map. The map ensures that beachgoers and swimmers can quickly locate their preferred swim site and access vital pollution forecasts with ease, all helping them to make informed decisions about where is safest to swim.

The journey from an outdated, manually intensive system to a modern, user-centric platform has revitalised the NSW Beachwatch program. It now ensures that beach goers, swimmers and the general public can continue to enjoy the NSW beautiful coastline with confidence and safety, and the Beachwatch team can focus on monitoring, driving advocacy and adoption, working with council partnerships and delivering the next generation of Beachwatch.

The redevelopment hinged off the extensive research with the users of Beachwatch, starting from in-depth consultations to understand current user experience and pain points through to developing a new information architecture and concept testing to provide the best usability. The key audience groups uncovered from the consultations revealed differing needs. Regular swimmers wanted a quick overview of information on their preferred beach to glance across, highlighting relevant information such as tides and water temperature, whereas important to infrequent users were an interactive map, and information around amenities and patrol information, provided in a clear visual language. Researchers and councils needed credible and reliable data, delivered in a clear and accessible way. From the outputs of the initial consultations new features such as the interactive maps, favouriting of beach sites functionality, and iconography, and defined the hierarchy of information, especially concerning Daily Forecast, Weekly Rating, and Annual Grade were explored and introduced.