The Bacon Dilemma
For a recent job interview, I was given a challenge: Solve a real-life user-experience problem that does not involve software or the internet.
I decided TESCO's unhelpful bacon packet
was primed for some problem-solving.
Overview
Sea/ is a B2B platform for the maritime shipping industry comprising everything from market intelligence to AI email scraping and a negotiation app. The size of the opportunity is huge, as the shipping industry is in desperate need of modernisation.
I worked in-house for 1.5 years within cross-functional squads across several products. Below are a couple of case studies from that time.
Redesign: Contract Negotiator
The opportunity
The contract negotiation app in the Sea/ platform was a beast. Users were getting by and using it to negotiate complex contracts, but new companies were coming back with endless problems and onboarding involved actual one-on-one training sessions with users.
Myself and a business analyst were tasked with redesigning the process to make it more user-friendly, which we did via a design sprint involving a few workshops and a round of usability tests with internal users.
My role
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UX research
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Testing
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Workshop facilitation
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Ideation
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UI design
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Handoff & implementation
The old product
Usability Tests
We conducted some user tests. Users said things like, "There's a lot going on" and "I don't know where I'm meant to click." Basically, there are features built on features, loads of calls to actions, it's confusing and overwhelming so the learnability and usability suck.
As the users' time was so valuable, we tested the old system with 2 users - not the optimal 5 as recommended by Norman Nielson, but infinitely better than none. We gave them 4 tasks and recorded insights during and after.
What you see here are all the insights from the users, mixed together....
...we grouped the insights organically into general topics...
...and within those topics, we identified trends (when both participants said the same thing about the same aspect of the product).
Redesign
Based on the trends identified in the user tests, we ideated and workshopped ways to solve the problems and support the things that were working well.
Key improvements included...
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Reducing an overwhelming list of call-to-actions to only the the most important, single action to return the contract to your counterparty
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Providing users with a clearer indication of whose turn it is, how they need to act and the status of their response
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Including a 'variables' panel which affords users the mapping of key values into clauses, something which existed before but was invisible to users.
Outcome
The result was a clearer, cleaner design that we validated with external companies. This redesign was implemented and released in November 2020 and has since been productised and sold to external customers.
Concept to MVP: The Scheduler
The opportunity
A (very) large shipping company came to Clarksons with a problem - their 'book' was chaotic and causing waste. A "book" is a maritime term for the list of cargoes and vessels that a company is responsible for managing.
Their book was spread across multiple spreadsheets, inboxes, software and bits of paper. The brief was fairly simple - solve that problem by creating a solution to manage all those data streams in one place.
My role
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UX research
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Workshop facilitation
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Client relations
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Ideation
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UI design
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Handoff & implementation
Understanding the Users
Presentation & Ideation with Clients
We agreed 3 pillars for the product:
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Never miss an obligation
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Provide data on the best book opportunities
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Build a transparent place to collaborate
Develop the Solution
User flow & low-fidelity wireframes
Mid-Fidelity
High-Fidelity
MVP Designs
The main dashboard displays every cargo and vessel on the book, arranged chronologically with automatic alerts when an unfulfilled obligation is coming up.
Users can add see an overview of the book or dig deeper into cargoes and vessels to find the best match and monitor performance for profit and loss calculations.
Outcome
We worked very closely with users and stakeholders on the client side to refine requirements, ideate the most inventive solutions and provide the most useful product we could. We felt this gave the product the best chance of success, and furthermore strengthened the customer relationship. The clients were very happy and today the product is live with them and 2 other large Maritime companies.