OceanSofar Ocean2024

Making non-adherence explainable at sea

Captains deviate from routing guidance for good reasons. I designed the layer that let shoreside operators see why, instead of just seeing a lower score.

My role: Product design lead — research, interaction design, and data visualization
Focus: Product design, UX research, Data viz, User testing
Outcome: Beta with one customer, then released to all customers

Sofar's Wayfinder adherence dashboard shown over a photograph of open ocean water

Context

Sofar’s Wayfinder platform evaluates millions of routes a day and tells captains when a better path to port opens up. It also sends a daily RPM recommendation.

Captains don’t always follow it — and they’re often right not to. Conditions shift, and what’s happening at sea doesn’t appear in a forecast model. But every deviation lowered the vessel’s adherence score, leaving shoreside operators with a number that said something went wrong without saying what.

How can we allow shoreside operators to reasonably justify when captains do not adhere to our recommendations?

The key decision

Justification, not compliance.

The obvious response to a low score is to push harder on adherence. That treats the captain’s judgment as the defect — when the captain has the most information about the actual sea state. Everything else followed from refusing that framing.

What I did

Built the vocabulary from customers. I asked what situations most often required departing from guidance. Those answers became the reason taxonomy.

Two versions of the deviation reason dropdown side by side. The shorter list has options including weather or sea conditions, marine traffic, mechanical issues, emergency, and ETA adjustment. The longer list adds RPM too low, RPM too high, and RPM sets off blowers. — Version two splits out RPM-specific reasons after operators told us 'mechanical issues' was hiding three different situations.

Put the reasoning next to the data. A column of notifications runs alongside the adherence graph. Selecting one highlights the matching day on the chart.

A separate tab would have been cleaner to build. Side by side forces operators to read cause and effect together, which is the whole point.

Guidance adherence dashboard showing a 30-day line chart of RPM adherence with shaded bands, a scrollable column of dated notification cards to the left, and summary metrics for RPM adherence distribution and route suggestion acceptance below

The same dashboard with one notification card expanded, revealing the master remarks field and a reason selector for that day's deviation

Kept the captain’s own words. Master remarks surface verbatim. Paraphrasing them into a status would have defeated the purpose.

Close-up of a master remarks entry in which a captain records that the vessel proceeded per Sofar route guidance, with the instructed RPM of 61 and expected speed of 11 knots

Adherence dashboard for a vessel at 100 percent RPM adherence and 100 percent route suggestion acceptance, with the notification column showing routine entries — It also had to read well when nothing went wrong — otherwise operators only open it to find fault.

Outcome

Beta with one target customer, then released to all customers after several weeks of positive feedback.

“One of the best tools you have prepared!” — Star Bulk