Open Angler UI/UX Design

Open Angler was a two-sided marketplace (think Airbnb for fishing) where enthusiasts could discover and book charter boat captains and tour guides for their next adventure.

Open Angler had a couple hundred active users but was struggling to grow. The marketplace structure was sound, but the experience was working against it. Search was clunky: users couldn’t easily filter by location, date, or trip type. Captain profiles lacked the social proof (ratings, reviews, photos) that builds booking confidence. The mobile experience was broken. And on the supply side, charter companies found the back-end listing management so frustrating that many gave up after creating their first listing, especially when dealing with multiple boats or geo-locations.

I started with a UX audit of both sides of the marketplace, mapping the customer booking journey and the captain listing flow to find the biggest drop-off points. The customer side needed trust signals and visual richness: ratings, reviews, map integration, and strong imagery that made you want to get on a boat. The captain side needed a management overhaul that made multi-listing, geo-tagging, and scheduling painless enough that boat companies would actually maintain their profiles. I also identified SEO opportunities: new landing pages structured around popular fishing destinations to capture organic search traffic.

I redesigned the full customer experience: simplified search with smarter filters, prominent ratings and reviews on captain profiles, integrated maps, and a gallery-forward layout that showcased the adventure. I refined the style guide to bring in more engaging colors for calls to action, improved spacing and hierarchy, and created fully responsive designs for the mobile experience. On the back-end, I redesigned the listing management system from scratch, smoothing the pain points around multiple listings, geo-location setup, and scheduling that had been driving charter companies away.

The redesigned platform was optimized for both conversion and organic search traffic, and the new designs were delivered just in time for Open Angler to secure a round of funding. I delivered a complete, production-ready design system covering both sides of the marketplace (customer-facing search and booking, and captain-facing listing management), all responsive and ready for their development team to build against. The startup ultimately didn’t find product-market fit and closed a few years later, but the design work demonstrated that the UX wasn’t the bottleneck; the market challenge was bigger than any interface could solve.