Vessel Procurement | Dani Portfolio

Vessel administration tool

Empowering procurement teams to manage vessel administration through a unified platform that simplifies workflows and enhances efficiency.

#OrstedMalaysia

*Some visuals and details have been modified to respect client confidentiality.

Overview

This tool provides project leads, logistic consultant and maritim specialist in the procurement team with vessel technical specifications, enables users to manage contracts and execute tenders, while also supporting vessel supply and demand planning.

Challenges

At the start, I had very little understanding of the tendering process. I had never studied or been involved in one before. This project gave me the opportunity to learn how the process works in practice.

Role

UI/UX Designer

Project time

approx. 3 months

Platform

Desktop

User

Project leads, logistic consultant & Maritim Specialist

Goal

This tool helps users plan ahead to determine what type of vessel to acquire or whether to extend an existing contract, based on supply and demand. Effective planning in this area is essential for optimizing costs and ensuring operational efficiency.

Initial meetings

In this project, my role was to redesign a Vessel Management Tool. Since it was my first time working on a project involving a tendering process, I began by building a foundational understanding of how it operates within the organization.

To do this, I:

Initiated discussions with a project lead who was directly involved in both procurement activities and application development.
Mapped out the tendering process, identifying key stages, involved departments, and their objectives.
Explored the existing application, focusing not only on its visible functionalities but also on the underlying logic, workflows, and data dependencies.
Discuss with product owner, what do we want to learn about the users and their vision on this product.
Identified primary user groups and their roles within the broader tendering ecosystem.

Through my initial meetings, I identified two main user groups:

Project Leads : Responsible for executing the tendering process, evaluating vessel options and aligning decisions with operational demand.
Maritim Specialists : Provide detailed technical specifications for vessels and support Project Leads in evaluating technical feasibility and performance.
Logistic consultant : Managing contracts include updating, extend and creating new contract

Project Leads often collaborate closely with Technical Specialists to:

Determine the vessel specifications required to meet operational demands.
Compare options based on price, availability, and suitability.
Identify opportunities to use a single vessel across multiple projects or sites.

Insights

These findings highlighted the importance of having a comprehensive vessel overview across different projects. Such visibility helps users make informed decisions that optimize cost efficiency, resource utilization, and fuel consumption.

User interviews

To gain a deeper understanding of how the vessel management tool was being used in real-world scenarios, I conducted user interviews with:

3 Project leads
2 Logistic consultant
2 Maritim Specialists

My goal was to uncover not just how they used the tool, but why, to understand their behaviors, motivations, and challenges in context.

During these sessions, I focused on exploring:

User workflows : how they navigated the app to complete core tasks such as managing tenders or reviewing vessel data.
Goals and expectations : what “success” looked like for each role within their daily operations.
Pain points and frustrations : moments where the tool slowed them down, caused confusion, or required workarounds.
Unmet needs and wishes : what they hoped the system could do to make their work easier or more efficient.

Through these conversations, I began to piece together a clear picture of the user journey from initiating a tender to evaluating vessels and tracking performance. These insights later became the foundation for defining design priorities and feature improvements that aligned with real user needs.

Key Insights

Reliance on external tools
Despite having a dedicated digital platform, users still relied heavily on Excel spreadsheets, particularly when comparing vessel specifications with supplier offers. This indicated gaps in the tool’s ability to support data comparison and decision-making directly within the system.
Limited scalability of the current layout
The existing interface did not scale well when managing multiple contracts. As the number of contracts increased, navigation became cumbersome, and handovers between team members were prone to confusion or data loss.
Difficulty locating information
Users struggled to find specific contracts or vessels due to the lack of a search function, inconsistent site naming conventions, and a contract structure that was difficult to interpret especially for new or infrequent users.

Following the discovery of key insights, I conducted a collaborative session with the development team and our user proxy (the project lead, who has been engaged in the discovery process from the start) to identify and explore new opportunities. The identified opportunities are outlined below:

Enable in-platform vessel comparison
- Introduce functionality that allow users to compare vessel specifications and supplier offers directly within the system.
- Provide export or summary options for reporting without breaking workflow continuity.
Improve scalability and contract management
- Redesign the interface to handle a growing number of contracts without overwhelming the user.
- Implement clear hierarchy, grouping, or filtering mechanisms for better organization.
Enhance information findability and navigation
- Integrate a robust search and filtering function to help users quickly locate vessels, contracts, or sites.
- Standardize site naming conventions and data structures to improve clarity and consistency.
- Simplify the contract structure and navigation paths to support both experienced and occasional users.

Design phase

Old design

After redesign

During this phase, I collaborated closely with both developers and users in an iterative process. I facilitated design critique sessions where we reviewed the designs together, discussed usability and feasibility, and gathered direct feedback from users to refine the solution.