Case Study

Sea/ by Maritech

Complex SaaS for Maritime Operations

Role Lead UX Designer
Duration 2 years 3 months (2020–2022)
Scope 2 SaaS products, end-to-end design ownership
Domain Maritime shipping (Clarksons PLC subsidiary)

Context

Sea/ by Maritech (a subsidiary of Clarksons PLC) builds SaaS products for the shipping industry. I owned UX design across 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.

Sea Ops

Tracks vessel progress, delays, costs and P&Ls for shipping operations

Sea Contracts

Supports bi-party contract negotiation, recording and approval workflows

Maritime shipping vessel

Year 1: The COA Feature

A year-long, end-to-end project to build the flagship addition to Sea Ops — enabling users to record and track Contract of Affreightment fixtures over time.

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: emails, spreadsheets and institutional knowledge. No single source of truth.

The SIAS Framework

I introduced a framework to define each step of the journey with clarity, removing ambiguity in a domain where the same term could mean different things to different users:

S
Stimulus

What triggers the user to interact with the system

I
Intent

What they're trying to achieve at that point

A
Action

What inputs and interactions are needed

S
Success

What completing that step looks like

SIAS framework documentation
SIAS framework — shared language for requirements
Happy path user journey mapping
Journey mapping — recording a COA fixture

Information Architecture

After defining actions 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.

Information architecture structure
IA — purposeful structure rather than accumulated data

Technical Collaboration

Worked with engineering leadership to shape how an event-driven architecture would surface real-time vessel, delay and cost data in the UI. This required understanding the technical trade-offs and influencing the architectural approach.

Sea Ops product interface
Sea Ops interface
COA Lifting vessel tracking
COA Lifting — vessel tracking

Year 2: Sea Contracts Redesign

After delivering the COA feature, I moved to Sea Contracts — joining at the start of an R&D cycle. The history and audit sections had grown organically around legacy code and couldn't 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. Then redefined the audit and history model to support multi-stage workflows — working within the constraints of the existing codebase.

Outcome

✓ Replaced fragmented spreadsheet and email workflows with unified system
✓ Delivered the COA feature — flagship addition enabling real-time fixture tracking
✓ Shaped discovery groundwork, IA and prototypes for the Contracts rebuild
✓ Introduced SIAS framework as shared language for requirements definition

What This Demonstrates

  • Deep domain complexity — learning a highly specialised industry, earning user trust, and designing for expert workflows worth millions per transaction.
  • End-to-end ownership — discovery, IA, interaction design, and technical collaboration across two simultaneous products over 2+ years.
  • Framework introduction — SIAS gave the team a shared language that removed ambiguity in an ambiguous domain.
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