Voyage Monitor dashboard

Before designing a single screen, I spent time understanding how operational managers work. Together with a researcher, I conducted interviews with captains and fleet managers, mapping their daily tasks, decision points, and pain points directly on the wall.

Key findings:

• Managers called a captain up to once per day to gather data that should have been automated.
• 7 separate tools meant critical context lived in different places, and sometimes fell through the gaps.
• Manual entry created data accuracy issues that compounded downstream into compliance risk.

Before wireframing, I mapped the complete data model, what the system monitors, what it measures, and what additional context it surfaces.

1. Monitored object: Vessel identity (name, status, voyage route, performance metrics).
2. KPIs/Monitored values: Grouped by compliance, efficiency, and route optimisation.
3. Contextual data: Charts, weather, events, and geospatial position that explain why a KPI is deviating.

This flow maps how an operational manager moves from noticing a KPI deviation to resolving it.

The core design insight:
Users don’t land on a dashboard and read it top to bottom. They arrive at a specific KPI because something flagged their attention. The IA needed to support investigation paths, not just display.

Each KPI category (compliance, efficiency, route performance) has its own investigation path, which data to check next, which chart to open, and when to escalate to vessel contact.

Later explorations focused on the fleet-level view: how managers monitor multiple vessels simultaneously and drill into a specific vessel’s voyage details.

Design decisions:

• Progressive disclosure: From summary KPIs at fleet level to full voyage detail on click. Users shouldn’t need to navigate away to answer “why is this vessel deviating?”
• Event log alongside map: The vessel route and its event log sit side by side, so managers can correlate a position change with a reported incident without switching screens.
• Vessel search with disambiguation: Search results show route context (origin to destination) to help managers identify vessels with similar names.

The Voyage Monitor dashboard became 90POE’s core product module, shipping from a single client engagement to the world’s leading maritime platform.

1. 7 to 1 tools consolidated into a single source of truth.
2. Minutes to Seconds decision time for fleet operational managers.
3. Core infrastructure: What started as one dashboard became the foundation of the entire OpenOcean platform.