When your brand owns an incredible 80% of the global scuba market, your biggest competitor might be your teams' ability to scale. PADI reached a strategic inflection point where their massive global reach was being held back by a digital footprint split across five entirely different architectures. Because their worldwide platforms had been built independently over decades, their internal product teams were stuck in deep silos, data logic was totally inconsistent, and their digital presence felt increasingly fragmented to divers and PADI retail members. PADI recognized that maintaining this outdated complexity was costing them a steep premium in both dollars and effort. To chart a way forward, they partnered with Border UX to understand the current customer experience and to envision the future of diving.
To kick off our engagement, we brought leads from across PADI's teams together for an in-person workshop. At Border UX, we always prioritize a human connection with the teams we collaborate with. Together we ran a dynamic, two-day in-person workshop with members of PADI's teams including engineering, design, and product leadership. We established a shared understanding of the challenges and mapped out exactly how we'd collaborate over the following months. Gathering in the same room sets the entire tone for a partnership. During the workshop, we guided their team through documenting their current internal assumptions, baseline understandings, mapping current user archetypes, and capturing core curiosities and hypotheses. Together, we bucketed the burning questions the group needed answered or validated by real customers, creating a highly aligned launchpad for our research study.
Our team of researchers got to work learning from the global diving community. We ran 51 in-depth global interviews across 18 countries, deliberately conducting 1:1 conversations in both English and Spanish to significantly expand our reach and capture firsthand insights from a broad cross-section of divers around the world. We supplemented these conversations with localized surveys fielded in 11 languages, pulling in 1,097 total responses. At Border UX, we focus on uncovering the human reality—going beyond standard talking points and corporate metrics to surface the lived experiences of real divers. To help PADI's global leadership choose the right digital strategy for their ecosystem, we brought them unfiltered customer and employee insights that internal surveys were missing. We made a point of advocating fiercely for the instructors, dive center owners, and potential divers who interact with the brand today, or will in the future.
The ultimate goal was to build a unified digital foundation that expands PADI's reach, supporting existing communities while welcoming the next generation of divers.
The challenge: data gaps and operational silos
As PADI scaled, their digital customer experience became incredibly complex. Because user journeys were completely undefined, product teams lacked a central source of truth for cross-platform behavior, leading to massive drop-offs and blind spots. Highly experienced divers with thousands of logged dives were virtually invisible and incorrectly flagged as "lapsed" or "inactive;" internal systems only tracked new course certifications. On the ground, the friction was causing real operational exhaustion. Survey data revealed that 44% of members viewed using PADI's digital tools as a time-consuming "chore," with nearly 1 in 4 instructors resorting to manual spreadsheets just to bypass official platforms. The team uncovered small pitfalls with major consequences throughout the journey. One prime example: without profiles for those under 18, parents trying to sign up their children for diving experiences were forced to create fake emails for each child just to set up an account.
The solution: human-centered blueprints for change
Our maps of the lived experiences of the diving experience focused on three core journeys:
- Start Diving
- Keep Diving
- Teach Diving
To allow our small team to work effectively at this massive global scale, we leaned into highly strategic, "human-in-the-loop" AI workflows:
- Rapid field note automation: We designed custom prompt sequences to instantly transform raw transcript data into uniform, "field note"- style summaries immediately following each interview, rapidly accelerating the way we shared insights with internal stakeholders.
- Regional cross-analysis: We paired custom AI analysis prompts with tools like NotebookLM to ingest and analyze large datasets, enabling us to parse massive qualitative survey files faster and with greater objectivity.
- Traceability checks: To prevent hallucinations or contextual misunderstandings, no AI was left to run on autopilot. Our team rigorously cross-checked and validated every automated output against our own qualitative analysis, ensuring every structural theme could be traced directly back to a raw transcript block.
- Expertise-driven prompting: While the automated workflows completely revolutionized how quickly we tagged transcripts, the process ultimately deepened our own expertise in prompting, allowing us to scale our operational output without losing the high-level human intuition that defines our design team.
- Ecosystem deliverables: These workflows directly powered our core deliverables in FigJam, pairing detailed current-state friction maps with future-state strategic ideation, defining seven foundational digital objects (Destination, Experience, Dive Center, Pro, Course, Trip, and Diver), and embedding targeted "How Might We" frameworks directly into PADI's product backlogs.
The result: structural alignment and real confidence
With the new journey maps and structural objects in place, PADI's leadership, product managers, and designers can build and prioritize new features and improvements faster and with less guesswork. The team building the new PADI.com immediately used our object-relationship mappings to finalize the digital framework and prioritize their upcoming global feature roadmap.
By explicitly bridging the gap between the messy present and an ideal future, the blueprints gave PADI's teams a genuine North Star. By bringing the voices of real community members directly into corporate discussions, our partnership gave PADI a clear, trackable path to build tools that support dive shop owners' businesses and inspire new and seasoned divers alike.
Nick M., owner of the diving school in the UK, highlighted exactly where this new, unified framework creates real value for the business:
"The core thing for me with PADI is that trigger. Inspire people to want to learn to dive, and then that churn that you create from there. You've got the opportunity then to fix everything else along the way."
This strategic partnership demonstrates how looking beneath the surface of a market leader can completely transform a brand's understanding of their customers' experience, paving the way for continued success and global innovation.