OTG seafarer dashboard: Design 'vision'
The challenge was to present information and functionality that will have a positive effect on the personal wellbeing of seafarers and provide them with a digital ecosystem that will enhance their experience of life at sea. Bringing together OTG services and functionality that was previously presented in silos that were not reflective of the organisations ambition of a more integrated and holistic digital platform.
I was tasked with presenting this 'vision' to the executive leadership team to get buy-in to the direction it promoted. The project was given a deliberately provocative timeframe and was undertaken by a remotely based design team, under my direction, which was located in the UK, Germany, Norway and Poland.
As the project was condensed into a short period of time, UX research methods were employed to get the necessary insights from the target user group in a relatively short period of time. We didn't have time to develop full personas for the project, so instead we pulled together proto-personas, leveraging the considerable experience of Ocean Technologies Staff who had backgrounds as commercial seafarers. This meant we were able to quickly understand the challenges, desires and problems faced by the modern merchant sailor and develop a hypothesis that would guide us in the design and production of the proposed solution.
Our goal was to present a solution that would resonate with the target user-group and excite the OTG executive leadership team. We wanted to present ideas that would really appeal to seafarers and show how we could enhance their life-at-sea experience. We wanted to address the issues that were really important to those men and women who work long hours in hazardous and often hostile environments.
I wanted to present a solution that felt integrated and looked modern and elegant. A surface layer that presented a complex digital ecosystem in a simple, easy to navigate interface. The obvious starting point for such a presentation was a dashboard and it was decided that we would use the concept of a seafarer dashboard as a starting point, to bring together the various OTG divisions together in a unified solution.
Aspects of maritime training (Ocean Learning), job-hunting and day-to-day living (Ocean Crew) and ship management (Ocean Fleet) needed to feel at home, side-by-side in the concept.
This dashboard would feature all the things that we learnt were important to the seafarers mental wellbeing: home, family, connectivity, food, career progression, training, journey details and physical health. We also decided to further explore and develop one aspect of this into a companion phone app concept, designed to support the individual in their day-to-day existence. This app was to illustrate the importance of food to the individual, something that we learnt through the research phase of the project.
The design vision and prototype were delivered on-time and the presentation was made to the executive leadership team. This was universally lauded as "one of the best things we have ever seen at Ocean".
I was able to pull together what were previously disparate platforms into one interface and we were able to go beyond the expectations of the stakeholders with the presentation of the companion food app. The research phase, although short, delivered critical information into the project that allowed us to provide a solution that really delivered value for the intended user group and the business.
By leveraging some work that had previously been done by my team on a design system for Ocean, we were quickly able to pull together a stylish, practical and easy to use interface that presented essential data and functionality in a design that was wholly in-keeping with the Ocean brand and its wider digital offering.
The 'vision' presentation has, without doubt, set the tone for future direction within Ocean and raised the bar to new levels in terms of brand integration, understanding of our users and interface design.
