Equipment register
Industry
Maritime
Client
Navilands
Service
Product design/ UX
Date
2024
Managing equipment across vessels was fragmented and difficult to navigate. Similar machinery was grouped inconsistently across manufacturers, models, and naming conventions, making it hard for crew and shore based teams to quickly locate or compare equipment.
This led to inefficiencies during inspections, maintenance planning, and day to day operations, where speed and clarity are critical.
The goal of this project was to introduce a clearer, standardised structure using SFI classification, improving how equipment is grouped, searched, and understood across the system.
Research
I began by auditing the existing Equipment Register, reviewing Figma files, user feedback, and support tickets to understand where users were struggling.
Through conversations with both onboard crew and shore-based teams, a few consistent issues emerged:
Users struggled to locate equipment due to deep, inconsistent hierarchies
Terminology varied across manufacturer, model, and system naming
Critical information (such as install count and status) was difficult to surface quickly
Workflows required jumping between multiple screens and filters to complete simple tasks
To validate this, I analysed real vessel data and observed how users interacted with the system during inspections and maintenance planning. This highlighted a clear gap between how the system was structured and how users actually think about and search for equipment.
From this, I identified key opportunities to:
Simplify navigation and reduce hierarchy depth
Standardise classification using SFI
Improve search and filtering to match real user behaviour
Surface critical information more clearly within the main view
These insights directly shaped the direction of the redesign, focusing on making the register faster to navigate, easier to understand, and more aligned with real workflows.
Personas
To ensure the redesign reflected real-world usage, I worked closely with both onboard crew and shore-based teams to understand how their needs differed.
Rather than creating personas as static profiles, I focused on identifying key behavioural patterns:
Crew members needed fast access to equipment details and status during inspections
Shore-based users focused more on planning, reporting, and cross-vessel visibility
This helped clarify that the system needed to support both quick, task-focused interactions and broader, planning-driven workflows.
These distinctions directly informed how information was structured, surfaced, and prioritised across the experience.
User flows
I mapped the core end-to-end workflows to understand how users moved through the system when completing key tasks such as:
Searching for equipment
Viewing details and status
Updating records during inspections
This exposed several inefficiencies:
Users were forced to navigate deep hierarchies to complete simple actions
Key actions were fragmented across multiple screens
Critical information was not surfaced at the right point in the flow
Using these insights, I restructured the flows to:
Reduce unnecessary steps and navigation depth
Consolidate key actions into fewer, more intuitive interactions
Align the system structure more closely with how users think about equipment
I iterated on these flows in collaboration with PMs and engineers, ensuring they were both user-friendly and technically feasible before moving into high-fidelity design.
