SlabLab
SlabLab is a company I founded with professional mountain guide Richard Bothwell to bring the power of design to the winter backcountry sports community. This includes backcountry skiing, splitboarding, snowmobiling, and anyone traveling on snow outside of a resort. When I got into backcountry skiing I learned that it's really as much about human behavior and decision making as it is snow – and I had a toolkit to bring that wasn't present in the industry yet: Human-Centered Design.
SlabLab has a research side and a product side. Each year we conduct and publish a new qualitative study, and we built a community app with teamwork at its heart.
Design Research for the Backcountry
The research practice is the heart of the company. This field has great social scientists but, to my knowledge, nobody else is doing research with the lens of problem solving and innovation that design gives us. We've released three studies, each with concepts, concrete recommendations and resources that both individual athletes and industry members can use. I'm proud to say this work has gained us trust in the field. Our most recent work is in partnership with the Northwest Avalanche Center, supporting the design of their industry-leading app and web platform.
Our reports are web based so dynamic elements can reinforce the storytelling. I'm often not a fan of websites hijacking scroll events but here I employ a vertical progress bar so the user continues to get feedback.
The SlabLab Community app
The app is where that research lands in people's hands. Across a hundred interviews the number one pain point in the sport was finding good partners. In the SlabLab community we help connect compatible partners for risk taking, but also incorporate safety and education into the formation of their team and first tours.
When UX details make the difference
Summer Mode
While most apps try to maximize engagement, I am proud to step off that treadmill. My job is to get people off the app, into the outdoors, and back safely. Summer mode makes it easy to reduce notifications while at the same time helping those still skiing find each other.
I considered each detail about making it opt-in vs out, which notifications it affects, default filters when searching for partners and how it all shows up in the UI. The summer mode toggle even jumps to the top in the months you're likely to want it, and moves to the bottom during winter.
The particular culture of this sport's community comes with a fairly strong aversion to technology. As longtime members of this community, we feel that too. There's a purity to the mountains and human connection somehow feels stronger up there. Certain things, our editorial processes and design judgements, will always be done by us.
At the same time, we exist to innovate in our products and push what's possible with a two-person team. Our use of AI goes well beyond coding. We're currently iterating on a (RAG-powered) knowledge base that lets professionals search and use the entire corpus of available research on snow and avalanches in new ways. We're also innovating on workflows for business development and social media content. Please reach out to learn more about these efforts.