My Port
Together with local authorities, the Port of Rotterdam requires ships that call on the Port of Rotterdam to complete nautical forms and checklists. These forms are usually completed and submitted to the Harbour Masters of the Port of Rotterdam by shipping agents -- local representatives of the shipping companies that arrange the formalities for ship and cargo. Good communication between the parties is essential for a modern and intelligent port.
Situation and Design brief
The Port of Rotterdam offered the nautical forms on their website for agents to download and save them on their local desktops, before e-mailing them to the Harbour Coordination Centre. This presents all kinds of challenges concerning validation and version control. To meet the Port Authority's ambitions, the desire arose to develop a digital Customer Portal. Here shipping agents can digitally submit nautical forms and drastically reduce the number of e-mails and calls the Harbour Master receives daily.
Solution and My role
We organised a design sprint with a team of designers to validate our assumptions and create the first concept for My Port. We conducted interviews with a variety of stakeholders, from local authorities to shipping agents and Harbour Masters. From the insights learned in the design sprint, we formulated a vision for an MVP that we designed and built with a SCRUM team. The MVP consisted of digitising the two most commonly used forms and a dashboard environment where agents can check the status of their submitted requests.
I was responsible for looking into the existing nautical forms and researching the possibilities to make these forms more efficient and concise. I created high-fidelity mock-ups of the forms to test their usability and verify the validation schemas that we implemented to reduce the delivery of incorrect or incomplete forms. Furthermore, I was responsible for documenting the design patterns that we created.
Results
We released the MVP for a limited pilot group of shipping agents who started declaring their nautical requests using digital forms. After the successful initial launch of the platform, we iterated on the dashboard and forms by researching the pilot group. After some time, we expanded to include the entire user group and we digitised additional forms.
