Historical professional work · Public-service software · Skåne
Kullaberg
A family of visitor-facing digital products for Naturum Kullaberg and the Kullaberg nature reserve, designed around trails, place, offline access and the reality that the product is used outdoors rather than at a desk.
- Niche
- Nature-reserve visitor information and participation
- Surfaces
- Mobile PWA · information desk · citizen science
- Context
- Bilingual · outdoor · intermittent connectivity
- Role
- Frontend JavaScript application development and design
The niche
A nature-reserve application succeeds only if it helps someone move through the real place.
The Kullaberg App combined trail descriptions, points of interest, maps, GPS-linked destinations, Street View/directions handoff, contact information and bilingual English/Swedish content. Offline support mattered because the visitor experience could not assume reliable connectivity across the reserve.
The digital product therefore complemented physical signage, staff and external map tools instead of trying to replace them.
What made it distinctive
It was less a single app than a small public digital ecosystem.
Fast, responsive trail and site information with offline behavior and homescreen installation.
A related presentation adapted the same place/content domain to a staffed or kiosk-like visitor-centre context.
A later project explored missions, data submission, offline storage and participation incentives rather than limiting visitors to passive consumption.
The UI was constrained by nature-reserve graphic standards and public-sector context rather than designed as an isolated consumer brand.
Product & design thinking
The important design decision was to minimize friction between digital information and the physical environment.
Location links deliberately handed off to mapping capabilities when those tools were better at navigation. Contact actions opened the relevant phone, email or social application. Trail material was made available offline. Emergency information stayed explicit. The product was useful because it respected the broader device ecosystem rather than trying to own every task.
The citizen-science direction added another layer: visitors could become contributors. The proposed reward/gamification system was not decoration; it was a retention mechanism for repeated data collection and an operational bridge back to Naturum staff.
Development approach
The technical approach was deliberately web-first, portable and maintainable by a small public-service team.
The projects targeted modern mobile browsers, progressive-web-app behavior, static deployment and offline use. The citizen-science project preferred modern ES6 and a relatively light frontend stack rather than introducing a large framework for its own sake, while using CI to keep deployable branches healthy.
In retrospect, the work is an early version of themes that still recur in my current engineering: offline resilience, explicit boundaries, responsive interaction, accessible public information and choosing the simplest runtime architecture that fits the product.