Tightly scheduled spontaneous fun

If you’re like me, and I know I am, you know that ‘spontaneous fun’ often requires a lot of planning. Sure, there are people who just randomly jump on a bus to Chicago and end up with a great weekend, but you only hear about those stories because they are the exception, not the rule. Trips must have a certain amount of planning. And planning means an interface of some sort.

Cruises, need planning even more so. You are having the time of your life – on a very tight schedule. If you are on a cruise, you are on NAVY time. The cruise ship will leave when the cruise ship will leave. No exceptions. Even if you ask really nicely, and know the captain, that ship has a schedule, and if the ship is in a busy port, hundreds of workers much less other ships are also on a schedule. That ship is leaving.

I mention this because I was once on a cruise and PANICKED when I realized I was half an hour away from the port, didn’t speak Spanish, and the ship was leaving in 30ish minutes. This leads to my first design for a cruise ship app – a PANIC button, in the form of the name of the cruise, the ship, and the captain, top right. Click it and emergency needs are there, ready to speak Spanish for you when you desperately need them. Maybe in the future it can also send an emergency beacon and drunk yahoos like me can have a car sent to bring me to port.

Hopefully, your mileage will vary and you’ll be better prepared than I.

Which brings me to my second interface – planning your fun. Cruises have a brazilian things to do. You want to ride a submarine? Done. You want to pet a sea turtle? Yeah, probably. You want to sit on a beach sipping margaritas? Yup.

But how do you browse all these things and reserve them so you don’t have to elbow your way past hundreds of other cruisers?

Here’s the interface:

Basic cruise planner

It is an iPhone app, usable when buying a cruise, prior to boarding, or even while on the ship.

The basic operation is, once you have a cruise in mind, you can browse activities much like one browses people in Tinder – slide left to dismiss, slide right to keep. If you want, you can filter by day available and/or activity type, or just browse.

Presumably, once you have an item in mind, you can just book it on the app (in another screen).

If we have a bit more room, say an iPad, we can actually get a complete planner going.

This would show the whole cruise (scrollable date columns could continue to the right, and down for additional times). Each date is represented by a column showing the weather, arrival times, departure times, port of call, and other pertinent details.

The user would be able to scroll items in full screen, then if they feel like reserving something, the gallery would minimize to the left, the calendar would open and the user could drag the affordance into the calendar to reserve.

Note because events may be restricted to time/place, there is a requirement that the appropriate time be highlighted (red dotted line), so the user can drag/drop to reserve into that target.

This interface would also let the user tap on a time, like a normal scheduler, and create custom events (e.g. “Early dinner with Julie &+”). This system could also be linked to any restaurant system to ease reservations on board.

Make it so, Universe.