Complex SaaS for Maritime Operations

Lead UX Designer

Sea/ by Maritech — Complex SaaS for Maritime Operations

Role: Lead UX Designer

Timeline: 2 years 3 months (May 2020 – Jul 2022)

CONTEXT

Sea/ by Maritech (a subsidiary of Clarksons PLC) builds SaaS products for the shipping industry. Sea Ops helps users track vessel progress, delays, costs and P&Ls. Sea Contracts supports bi-party contract negotiation, recording and approval.

I owned UX design across both products — the first time in my career I was responsible for two core products simultaneously, each with its own users, domain complexity and technical constraints.

Maritime shipping is a highly specialised domain. Users manage contracts worth millions through processes that had historically lived in emails, spreadsheets and phone calls. The challenge wasn’t just designing good interfaces — it was understanding the domain deeply enough to know what “good” meant for these users.

YEAR 1: SEA OPS — THE COA FEATURE

 

The COA (Contract of Affreightment) feature was the flagship addition to Sea Ops — enabling users to record and track delivery contracts over time. This was a year-long, end-to-end project.

Discovery

With direct access to users and business stakeholders through Clarksons, I ran structured discovery to understand how COA fixtures were currently managed. The answer: mostly through emails, spreadsheets and institutional knowledge. There was no single source of truth.

Mapping the journeys

I collaborated with the product manager to map out user journeys, starting with the “happy path” and then systematically addressing edge cases and failure states.

We used a framework I introduced — Stimulus, Intent, Action, Success (SIAS) — to define each step of the journey with clarity:
• Stimulus: What triggers the user to interact with the system
• Intent: What they’re trying to achieve at that point
• Action: What inputs and interactions are needed
• Success: What completing that step looks like

Happy path - The journey of someone recording a COA

This framework removed ambiguity in a domain where the same term could mean different things to different users. It gave the team a shared language for defining requirements.

    Information architecture

    After defining actions and interactions for all paths, I built the information architecture — grouping related components, organising them into sections, and writing clear intentions for each section to ensure data was structured purposefully rather than just accumulated.

    Technical collaboration
    A key part of this project was working with engineering leadership to shape how an event-driven architecture would surface real-time vessel, delay and cost data in the UI. This wasn’t just a design decision — it required understanding the technical trade-offs and influencing the architectural approach.

    Outcome

    Delivered a unified system that replaced fragmented spreadsheet and email workflows. Users could now record, track and manage COA fixtures in a single product with real-time data updates.

    YEAR 2: SEA CONTRACTS — AUDIT & HISTORY REDESIGN

    After delivering the COA feature, I moved to Sea Contracts — joining at the start of an R&D cycle.

    The product supported bi-party contract negotiation, but the history and audit sections had grown organically around legacy code. They couldn’t properly handle the reality of maritime contracts: multi-stage edits, negotiation back-and-forth, and complex approval flows.

    I researched and mapped real-world contract processes with customers, domain experts and compliance teams. I then redefined the audit and history model to support these multi-stage workflows — working within the constraints of the existing codebase. This work shaped the discovery groundwork, IA and prototypes that were used to plan the product’s rebuild.