Flowstates

It is a numbers app. It does not feel like one.

flowstates runs on government numbers. Gauge readings, flow rates, a chart. Left alone, that kind of data reads like the website it came from, a spreadsheet you have to decode. I did not want that. I wanted it to feel alive in your hand, like a real product and not a readout. With a UX this lean, a few screens, that feeling had to come from motion.

Getting one to feel right was harder than making it work. A spring has no setting called "right." So to steer the tools, I had to name the feeling I was after. Claude and I built a small vocabulary for it. Jelly. Inertia. Boing. Squish. I would say a tap needed more boing, or a card was landing too stiff, and we tuned it until the word matched the motion. Naming the feeling was how I got the feeling. None of those words belong in a spec. They were the only way to get a tool to build what was in my head.

The other half was cutting. Each of these was good on its own. Stacked together they fought. Things slipped out of timing, the screen flickered, two animations wanted the same moment. So the real work became subtraction. I kept the few that carried the feel and cut the rest, even the ones I liked. The work was knowing which ones to protect.

None of it runs long. A few hundred milliseconds each. Enough to feel, not enough to wait on.

A serious tool with a beaver on it.

To me, branding is part of the craft, not a coat of paint at the end. A working build proves the app runs. The name, the mark, and the voice are what make it feel like a considered product instead of a tech demo. So I gave them the same attention as the screens.

The name

We all know the feeling of a flow state. Being so deep in the moment that everything else drops away. That's exactly what good whitewater gives you. It is also literally the state of the flow, the number the whole app turns on. Two meanings, one word, perfect.

The mark

A beaver. Not a decoration. It lives in the river and reads its flow, which is the whole app in an animal. Its tail is a paddle, the gear the app is built around. And a beaver's range is North America, the US and Canada, the exact water the app covers. The mascot lives on the same map the product reads.

The branding feels true to the mission, true to the community, fun, and memorable.

Live, on real data. Designed, built and shipped solo, ready to get people on the water.

flowstates is in production. It pulls live readings from USGS and ECCC, thousands of gauges across the US and Canada. Eighteen of them are runs I curated by hand, ranges and all. The rest are there to add. You install it on a phone and check it anywhere. It runs on free public data and a dataset I built, so keeping it alive costs almost nothing.

4

live data sources

5k+

gauges available

8

days zero to one

1

designer, solo

It is new, only days old. Friends and family are using it, but I have not promoted it to anyone else yet. I will keep testing and iterating, and push it past my own circle slowly.

Eight days from idea to launch. I spent most of that time on the feel. It mattered to me that it reads as a carefully considered product and not a database with a search box on it. The data layer was the smaller half, a stretch of plumbing.

And I came out of it with more than the app. The real outcome is how I work now. I learned to direct these tools, not just prompt them, and to catch a good answer that was still the wrong one. When I hit a real wall, the licensing problem, the motion that fought itself, I learned to work through it with the tools instead of around them. That is a way of working I did not have before this, and it is what I carry into the next project.

What I know is that it works, it shipped, and the hard calls were mine.