SHIPMATE, shipping crew management platform

Deliverables

• UI
• Usability
• Mockups
• Styleguides
• Templates
• Landingpage

Shipmate is a platform for ship management. You can plan the crew and training of the crew for large ships like oil tankers, tugboats and freighters.

Problem

Arranging shipping crews is like carefully arranging a wedding dinner for many guests. You need to consider many aspects of the crew like ethnicity, language, religion, diets, experience, skills, working hours, identity papers. The key is to get the right people in the right place at the right time for it to work. If these are not matched correctly the dinner will be ruined for sure. Also crews require a lot of training and certifications which needs to be planned when they are not on board.

As the tools were not created at the same time they looked and felt differently and not part of one platform. Also some data entry screens were so clogged with form fields with no or little visual difference that it was easy to make mistakes filling them in.

The client asked me to make their existing platform more user friendly and less prone to data entry errors while creating a consistent user experience across all tools on the platform.

Process

The first step was to figure out the current complex process of how/when/where the tools were being used and by whom. I then had interviews with users and product managers to determine what exactly were current bottlenecks in the use of the different tools.

Solution

The next step was to create userflows that mapped how the flow of actions of the users could be improved. I made wireframes of the most important screens and tested these with the stakeholders.

I then created mockups, templates and styleguides that could be used by the developers of the platform to keep the look and feel of the platform consistent and modern.