My Favorite Product: Surfline

Tell me about a product you like and use frequently. Why do you like it?

Surfline. Because it's innovative, useful, and understandable.

Surfline's Main Innovation:  Acquiring, Centralizing, and Unifying All Surf Data 

At its core, Surfline makes it easy for surfers to catch the best waves. To do that, the company combines meteorological statistics with twice-a-day, qualitative forecasts -- written by a surfers and scientists. To top things off, they - in a sense - know that they might be wrong on their forecasts; so, they provide hundreds of hourly surf cam recordings across the world, so you can assess surf conditions yourself. (To provide these surf cams, Surfline has partnerships with beaches and hotels to record the ocean.)



Surfline is useful
Surfline gives me all the information I need to decide whether I should drive one hour, round trip to my favorite surf spot, Pacifica.

Surfline tells me:

1. the surf (or wave) height, so I know if there are any waves to catch
2. the swell footage (distance between waves), so I know how many chances I'll have to catch waves
3. whether it's high or low tide (the waves are usually worse in high tide, but rocky beaches are safer in high tide)




If I need help interpreting, then I can read the day's surf report.



If I don't, then I can just watch the camera feed and assess for myself.

Surfline is easy to understand

Surfline knows that they have a lot of information. To help you get out faster, they prioritize the cam and the most important stats on the first screen. (If there is no cam for the surf spot, they show you their forecaster's report under the stats.)



As you can see, Surfline tells you that the surf conditions are "FAIR". They even color code it in green. (As a side note, FAIR is a really good surf condition for Pacifica.) If you need to dig more, they tell you the 3 stats they think matter most:  (a) surf height (b) tide height and (c) the wind mph. These stats are the first things my eyes are drawn to when clicking on a surf spot.

Verdict
By prioritizing the right information on your first click or two, Surfline makes it easy to understand what information you need to get out the door and start surfing. Surfline is infinitely useful as it has all the quantitative and qualitative information you'd might want to dig into. Just the fact that they are able to combine all these data sets and unify them into a concise, coherent forecasts that leaves flexibility for you, the user, to assess is delightful. And innovative.