Our client, TOTEÂ Services, staffs fleets of cargo vessels by connecting mariners with open positions on their ships. Their lean team of seven specialists coordinates with captains, mariners, travel agents, union reps, and more in the process of filling these positions.
They brought us in to build a custom solution to streamline their workflows and make staffing these ships quicker and easier.
I was the lead designer on this project, with one newly hired designer brought in late as a mentee. We worked alongside one system architect, one product manager, two QAs, and six developers.
Here are the main issues we found:
Repetitive manual data transfer
Throughout their entire staffing workflow, we tracked that the same core data points about an open position were manually transferred by the staffing personnel a whopping five times across various spreadsheets, emails, and internal HR systems. We needed to centralize this data in one place, and cut out copying and pasting.
No insight into system-wide status
Each team member tracked their open positions in individual Excel spreadsheets, stored in a shared drive. To get a sense of how well each vessel was staffed, the team manager would have to open and browse all of these spreadsheets. We needed to give her better insight into which team members might benefit from assistance and which vessels might have critical staffing needs.
Scattered knowledge base
For each of the ~20 unique positions on a ship, there are specific required certifications and documents. While filling a position, a team member would keep these requirements in mind by manually checking each mariner’s credentials against (you guessed it) internal spreadsheets. We saw an opportunity here to automate these repetitive checks and reduce the need for extensive external documentation.
We also took time during these interviews to imagine longterm growth opportunities for this new product. For MVP, we needed to replace their current workflow. But in the future, how might we move beyond this scope to make their lives even easier? To make TOTEÂ Services the preferred company of choice for mariners with plenty of options and lots of leverage?
"We want mariners to enjoy the experience of working with us."
We defined the primary focus of our new system as the job order. This is the open position that gets tracked in our system from the moment the Captain requests a new mariner to the final onboard check once the role has been filled. While filling a job order, a staffing team member communicates with Captains, travel agents, mariners, and their union reps — all to get the offsigning mariner off the ship and back home, and the onsigning mariner to the port and onboard.
We streamlined the several different steps that initially went into this process into a new workflow, shown below.
We walked them through the interactive prototype and gathered their feedback on how well the flow through this new system matched up with their mental models of their current workflows.
The team members were thrilled that we were bringing the many different facets of their work into one place, with consistent methods of tracking progress. They were particularly excited by the introduction of system-generated notifications and email templates, which help to simplify and centralize their many different communication streams.
We initially had each new job order being assigned to whatever team member had the least amount currently on their docket. The staffing team brought up the point that the work could be done more efficiently if each job order was instead assigned to a team member according to that team member’s default vessels — this way each team member could build up and maintain their knowledge and working relationships with Captains. We changed the flow so that the orders were assigned automatically based on this, with the option for the admin user (the team manager) to override job order assignment if needed.
The first version of this application rolled out with desktop as the main intended device, as the staffing team works exclusively on PCs. But in future iterations of the product, when Captains and mariners will be brought on as users, the product will need to scale so that these users can access the portal from their phones and tablets.
So, we designed and developed everything with responsiveness in mind — some of the earliest interactions were mocked up mobile first, and I wrote the Sass for our components using scalable grids to ensure they looked and worked beautifully across all devices.
Final rounds of user testing are currently under way, and feedback from the C-Suite level executives that brought us in has been resoundingly positive.
The most validating feedback, though, was the eagerness and relief expressed by the staffing team, who are currently pulling 60+ hour workweeks to manage incredibly high staffing volume.
Reduction in Manual Data Entry
"I don’t even know what we’ll do with the time this will save."
"We’ll be able to add more vessels to our fleet."
