V.Group
ShipSure 2.0, Transforming Marine Operations
An integrated management system & marine digital platform
An integrated management system & marine digital platform
As UX Lead and Creative Director, I partnered with V.Group’s executives, stakeholders, and marine crews to transform ShipSure, their flagship fleet management system. Over more than a year of collaboration, I directed the design of ShipSure 2.0, a modular and integrated digital platform that unifies marine operations, procurement, crewing, finance, and safety into one modern experience.
The result was a platform usable both on-ship and on-shore, designed to empower captains, chief engineers, crewing officers, and financial teams with real-time insights and streamlined workflows.
The result was a platform usable both on-ship and on-shore, designed to empower captains, chief engineers, crewing officers, and financial teams with real-time insights and streamlined workflows.
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Challenges
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• Legacy ShipSure system was fragmented, with separate modules for maintenance, procurement, finance, and crewing.
• Paper logbooks slowed down operations, with errors and duplication across ships. • Inconsistent UI patterns and siloed workflows made adoption difficult across global fleets. |
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My Role
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• Directed end-to-end UX strategy: from discovery onboard ships to final design delivery.
• Facilitated executive workshops to align priorities and define the MVP. • Led design of the digital logbook, a breakthrough innovation in fleet operations. • Ensured design-to-development fidelity through annotated wireframes and interaction specs. |
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Process
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• User Interviews & Surveys: Engaged executives, finance teams, procurement officers, and sea staff to understand pain points
• Contextual Inquiry Onboard: Observed engineers in engine control rooms and bridge offices of vessels like the Saga Pearl II and CSL Tecumseh. This immersion revealed the complexity of data entry under tight schedules and the reliance on physical logs. • Problem Area Prioritization: Defined challenges across four domains: Marine operations, Procurement, Crewing, and Finance. |
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Outcome and Impact
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• Digitized paper logbooks, reducing reporting errors by 35% and cutting data entry time in half.
• Rolled out to 300+ vessels globally, supporting captains, engineers, and finance teams. • Reduced onboarding/training time for new crew members by 25%, improving adoption. • Enabled real-time ship-to-shore reporting, improving operational decision-making speed by 20% |
Research & Discovery
I initiated the process with site visits to V.Ships’ Glasgow headquarters and multiple vessel trips to observe workflows firsthand.
UX Workshops & Alignment
led collaborative design workshops with executives, IT, and domain teams (finance, marine, procurement).
- Whiteboarding & Sketching: Used visual tools to align stakeholders on priorities and define success measures.
- Stakeholder Rally Sessions: Brought cross-functional teams around the same whiteboard, driving shared ownership of design outcomes.
- Personas & Goals: Created profiles for captains, engineers, procurement officers, and finance teams to ensure solutions met diverse needs.
Stakeholder working session
Finance working session
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Procurement working session
Executive platform planning
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Marine working session
Product stakeholders rally around a whiteboard to record ideas during brainstorming session
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Whiteboards
Whiteboarding and sketches were deliberate tools for problem-solving across stakeholder groups
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Contextual Inquiry
During several vessel visits, we took advantage of the embedded nature of the interview: seeing users in the shipboard context of their work allowed us to understand interconnections in their workflow, and ask questions to dig deeper into processes in order to uncover solutions.
Bridge office of the Saga Pearl II
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Engineering Control room onboard of the leisure Vessel Saga Pearl II ,
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Onboard of the CSL Tecumseh, a self discharging bulk carrier
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The Engine Control Room is located below the main levels of the ship, near the machinery spaces
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The Saga Pearl II, previously the Astoria, is a leisure vessel based in England.
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Conceptual Design & Information Architecture
We translated thousands of interview notes and sketches into tangible design concepts:
- Workflows & Wireframes: Defined clear task flows for daily operations, from procurement cycles to voyage reporting.
- Integrated Information Architecture: Connected previously siloed modules into a unified structure, improving navigation and reducing duplication.
- Digital Logbook: Designed a watch log and overview page that replaced paper logs with a digital system — automating inputs (like GPS), reducing errors, and improving data visibility
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Solution
ShipSure's new cutting-edge digital platform made significant progress in strengthening all aspects of business and ship management, and enabled better and more efficient communications between onshore and offshore teams, from marine operations and procurement to safety reporting and finance.
Digital Logbook
In addition to the main ShipSure application, the executive team and IT department of V.Ships wanted to understand details of how engineers fill in the (paper) engine logbook, and research requirements for digitizing onboard logbook data
Our solution to paper logbook entries: The digital watch log and overview page serves as a
table of contents, and provides a launching point for accessing,
entering, and approving logs
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Challenges
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• Deck and engine room logbooks are traditionally paper documents. Their information is static, involving much manual effort and the duplication of data
• Implementing a cost-effective system that will be successfully adopted by users is still a significant challenge |
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Strategic solutions
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• Reduce crew effort by inputting some data automatically (e.g., GPS), and remove duplication of effort
• Increase accuracy and efficiency • More powerful views of data, both in combination and comparison of data from disparate sources • Better storage, reduction of paper use |
Research
Our contextual inquiry revealed how paper logbooks have traditionally been used to manually record vessel and voyage data, and research confirmed that recording data in a paper format is a lengthy process, distribution of manually entered data is slow, and often entries are missing or incorrect due to human error.
The data in the log book are extremely important records which should be properly visible for future references
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Engineer are required to fill out the log book details at the end of every watch
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Engineers carry out rounds of checks and record measures before noon on every watch
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Recommendations for MVP
Our recommendations included a summary of vessels' contextual inquiries, activities performed, and key findings. It also outlined UX Workflow, interactions, general requirements and screen comps
