I love a good beach. I don't love most beach apps.

I visit the beaches in Southern Portugal several times a year, and I always struggle to compare local beaches.

There are plenty of apps that will tell you everything about a beach. Tide charts, wind speed, wave height, UV index. Useful if you know the beaches. Not so useful if you're a visitor trying to figure out which one's right for you.

The best resource I've found is algarvetips.com. Good descriptions, written by people who know the beaches well. But it was a lot of reading, and it left me a little overwhelmed.

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Lots of information. No clear answer.

There had to be a better way.

So I started talking to people close to me about how they chose a beach. Family, a couple of friends. Everyone had different priorities. That explained why beach apps are so information-heavy: they're trying to accommodate everyone at once.

But buried in all those different answers was one consistent pattern: they weren't asking for data. They wanted to know if a beach was right for them.

They wanted to know which beach fit what they planned to do there.

The Headspace moment.

I went looking for an interaction pattern that asks before it tells. Headspace does exactly that: a quick check-in, then a recommendation built from your answer.

Every beach app I'd looked at did the opposite. Dump everything up front, let the visitor sort it out. What if the question came first instead? Build an app that asks what someone wants to do at the beach, then use an algorithm to rank the beaches that match.

Quiz first. Ranked results. Detail page to confirm the fit. Get them out the door.

Testing broke things. That was the point.

I mocked up a low-fidelity version in Figma and tested it in the Algarve. My kids, their friends, my wife and sister-in-law surfaced problems fast.

"Find your beach" wasn't obvious as a button. One in five didn't tap it. Changed to "Start Quiz." Done.

The score was a bigger problem. Four out of five couldn't identify what the number meant.

Is it temperature? Is it like how many people liked it?

The real lesson wasn't about labels.

People didn't understand why the app was showing them what it was showing them. That bothered me more than any individual UI problem.

So I built transparency in at every level. The Beach Score became tappable with a clear explanation. Every amenity icon got a pop-up. The results page showed exactly which quiz answers were driving the rankings.

And on every beach detail page, whether someone arrived from a search or from their favorites, a "Best For / Less Good For" section told the honest story of that beach at a glance.

It's best for spending time with family and playing in the waves. That's cool. I actually like that a lot.

The hi-fi round confirmed the fixes worked.

This time, the prototype looked and felt like a real product. Clear hierarchy, obvious tap targets, nothing left to guess at.

Gone was the hesitation around the quiz button. Gone was the confusion about what the score meant. The amenity pop-ups and "Best For" sections held up too, nobody asked what an icon meant or why a beach ranked where it did.

It's a great way to get a high-level view of some good beaches in your neighborhood — and then you actually have pretty detailed information. A great way to discover beaches in the Algarve

On the branding.

I needed a visual identity, and I wanted something that felt like the Algarve, not like every other beach app.

My first instinct was the hand-painted lettering on the Schweppes tile signs you see all over the region. I tried pulling the typography straight from them. Gorgeous on ceramic. Didn't translate to a phone screen at all.

Mid-century travel posters proved to be the right inspiration. Warm, graphic, optimistic. The color palette came straight from the landscape: the red of the cliffs, the gold of the sand, the blue of the Atlantic in August.

What I'd do differently.

The quiz logic is theoretical. The questions work, but the underlying algorithm was never validated with real data. That's the work that would need to happen before this was a real product and it would mean talking to people who know these beaches far better than I do.

My Praia