Product case · 8 / 13
A messenger that had to work at sea
Product note. Organizations, dates, private data and implementation details are omitted.
The problem and the decisions
Carnival's HUB app needed an in-app messaging platform: real-time, linked to a guest's account, and usable in the worst network conditions a product can meet, a ship, mid-ocean, with thousands of people sharing one satellite link.
The interesting constraint was not the chat. It was that every assumption a messenger normally makes about connectivity is false at sea. A message that looks sent and is not is worse than one that visibly waits, so the product had to be honest about its own state before it was fast.
I led discovery and launch: who talks to whom, what happens to a message that cannot leave the ship yet, and how the interface tells the truth while it waits.
What it was built with
What I did
What I learned
In a degraded network, honesty about state beats speed. People forgive a slow message; they do not forgive one that lied about being delivered.