Digital port
Project from 2022
I was involved in a major project between Norwegian Coastal Administration, Port of Oslo and Grieg Connect titled “Norwegian digital port infrastructure”, where the goal was to create digital tools for workers of ports that would streamline their work and reduce unnecessary tasks. Read more about the project here and here.
Project kick-off
The project kicked off in the city of Kristiansand, where one of Grieg Connect’s offices is located. Prior to this kick-off me and 2 of our product owners had several sessions discussing the scope of the project and potential solutions, and how it could fit into out product portfolio. A lot of that work was done in Miro. We mapped all involved user personas, the needs that they have, and how our solutions could satisfy those needs.
The kick-off which happened later was meant to onboard all involved team members and inform them about the project, that’s where we also proceeded to discuss a rough scope for the deliveries planned. The project took roughly a year to complete.
Workshops
The project comprised three main work packages:
Vessel Traffic Monitoring Tools (Package 1): This package focused on developing tools for monitoring vessel traffic, including features such as live map views, historic playback, and data tables.
Ordering and Handling of Orders (Package 2): Package 2 centered around streamlining the ordering and handling of orders for vessels requiring power, water, and other services during their port stays.
Port Security and Visualization (Package 3): The third package dealt with enhancing port security, specifically how our existing Security application could visually represent essential data on a map. This included information relevant to port workers, such as the occurrence and duration of festivals in the ISPS area of a port.
Throughout the project, we engaged with various stakeholders, including port workers, terminal personnel, port administrations, and the Norwegian Coastal Administration. These interactions occurred through both physical workshops held in Bergen and Haugesund and digital meetings. Miro served as the central hub for most digital meetings.
Workshop Evolution:
Icebreaker Workshops: Early workshops served as icebreakers, allowing port workers to share insights into their typical workdays and daily activities.
Assumption Presentation Workshops: As the project progressed, workshops involved presenting our assumptions, seeking confirmation, denial, or further elaboration from stakeholders.
Insight Collection: At the conclusion of each workshop, insights were collected and categorized into clusters based on different themes. These insights formed the basis for further project development and refinement.
Ideation
In addition to confirming our assumptions with the users we had ideation sessions with them where they would come up with ideas as they see the solution to their daily problems would be. That could be less phone calls and emails and more digital ordering forms and chats for necessary contextual communication. I was drawing wireframes and testing different flows and IA throughout the whole start of the project, to summarize each workshop and further strengthen my understanding of the domain.
Final designs
After a while the scope and the functional requirements became very clear, and it was time to try around with some higher fidelity designs. This happened over the course of the year through different sub-projects that we worked on. One was for Orders of services and another one was for the vessel traffic (which was delivered through the Monitor project I presented here). The project leads and other team members at Grieg Connect were responsible for testing the solutions with users after they were developed.
Check out some of the design screens below.
