Maritime - digital ventures
Discovery & value propositions
A greenfield discovery project for a large energy company, to propose a digital venture in the maritime shipping space. I worked in a self organising team of 3 (myself as a lead service design, a product owner and a tech lead) - to help lead the research enquiry, bring in design thinking processes new to the business, and take stakeholders on our journey.
The problem
The shipping industry is a huge, complex ecosystem of players and agendas (sometimes conflicting), with antiquated processes prone to inefficiencies and delays. Our task was to find a problem to solve and propose a digital solution for further funding.
Journey mapping through the lens of a vessel
To navigate the complexity, I decided to start learning around the context of a vessel charter. I spent 3 weeks working closely with SME’s for a 101 on this end to end journey, and to map it out. This gave us a base to navigate further enquiry - going macro or micro as and when required.
The post-its were digitised into swimlanes and verified across the business with other SME’s. There were 6 maps/chapters to explain the full journey, along with other mappings to convey undestanding and models.
Contextual enquiry
We undertook field trips to talk to people directly about their tasks, challenges and social situations. This lead to further learnings that I mapped out, as well as a build up of jobs, pains and gains.
Design thinking
Throughout the process of talking to many people, we would gather and analyse our findings, and have collaborative whiteboard sessions to explore problems and solutions, as well as scope out timings.
Idea experiments
As ideas took shape, I wrote use cases to discuss with people we had previously talked to. I illustrated mental models of systems to discuss value and desirability.
I sketched out IA’s and 1 or 2 keyscreens to visualise a potential MVP. We had 3 ideas in total to play back to stakeholders.
