How Do Sailors Plan a Trip?

Sailing trip planning is uniquely complex. It spans two distinct phases: pre-trip research weeks before departure, and dynamic re-planning at sea based on weather, crew preferences, and conditions. Sailors juggle pilot books, Navionics, Google Maps, TripAdvisor, and WhatsApp simultaneously, with no single tool connecting the full planning workflow.

Despite this complexity, existing digital tools are designed in isolation: navigation apps handle charts but not itineraries, review platforms cover restaurants but not anchorages, and none support collaborative planning between crew members across multiple boats. The literature confirmed what I suspected from my own sailing experience - no study had involved sailors as co-designers of their own planning tools.

I designed a four-stage mixed-methods study to capture both phases of planning and move from observation through to actionable design guidelines. Each method built on the last: observations revealed what sailors do, ethnography showed what happens in practice, photo diaries captured what matters emotionally, and co-design sessions turned findings into features.

The ethnographic data was analysed using DiCoT (Distributed Cognition for Teams), mapping physical layouts, information flows, and artefact use across the three boats. This surfaced how planning cognition is distributed across people and tools, and where that distribution breaks down under real sailing conditions.

All qualitative data was then coded through Reflexive Thematic Analysis, combining deductive codes (pre-defined planning methods, challenges) with inductive themes that emerged during a second analysis pass. My own sailing expertise was treated as a resource for richer interpretation, not a bias to eliminate, consistent with Braun & Clarke's reflexive approach.

Moving information between tools is the core pain point. Every participant used three or more tools simultaneously, but finding the same destination across them was consistently difficult. Scale differences between Google Maps and Navionics, inconsistent place naming, and the lack of any shared itinerary layer meant sailors constantly lost context switching between tools. One participant accidentally selected a restaurant 300 miles from their intended location because Google Maps returned results from a different region entirely.

At sea, coordination multiplies the problem. DiCoT analysis of a multi-boat lunch stop decision revealed how planning cognition fragments when skippers can't see each other. One skipper photographed a bay on the B&G chartplotter and sent it via WhatsApp, but unrelated messages immediately displaced it, the zoomed photo made coastline recognition impossible, and the receiving skipper had to hand over the helm to spend minutes scanning the chart for a match. Communication that should take seconds consumed the attention of the person responsible for safety.

Sailors plan in skeleton, not in detail. Participants created loose itineraries with backup options for each day rather than rigid schedules. The recurring theme was needing a Plan B (and C and D) because weather, crew energy, and conditions change constantly. No existing tool supports this flexible, multi-option planning style.

The co-design sessions validated findings while pushing beyond them. Co-designers collaboratively built two personas representing opposite ends of the sailor experience spectrum, then used those personas to critique six conceptual sketches I presented through a modified claims analysis.

The most valuable outcome wasn't the critique of my ideas but what co-designers generated themselves: 26 additional feature ideas grounded in their own experience. Key themes included integrated distance calculators (drop two pins, get nautical miles and sailing time), flexible itineraries that support backup options, shared planning workspaces visible to all crew, and location information combining navigational data with what sailors actually care about: sunset spots, clear water, seclusion.

This was the first study in the sailing domain to use co-design, and the first to co-create personas with sailors, confirming that participatory methods surface insights that observation alone cannot.

This project taught me the value of being both insider and researcher. My sailing experience gave me credibility with participants, helped me recognise non-obvious behaviours during ethnography, and meant I could conduct the study safely while skippering a yacht. It also required disciplined reflexivity, using my subjectivity as a resource while staying honest about its limits.

The biggest methodological lesson was the power of triangulation. Observations told me what sailors do, ethnography showed me what happens under real conditions, photo diaries revealed what they value emotionally, and co-design let them shape solutions directly. Each method alone would have produced a partial picture, together they built a complete understanding of a problem space no single tool currently solves.