UX FOUNDATIONS

Models, Doodles and Frameworks.
Joining as the first designer meant starting from zero - no process, no tools, no product culture. This is the story of what had to happen before a single screen could be designed - and why getting the foundations right changed everything that followed.

Research & Discovery

Info Architecture

Established the UX foundations - research, thinking models and a lot of workshipping. The invisible work that made everything else visible.

TL;DR

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First Principles

THE PROBLEM / CONTEXT

The V1 had proved the market demand. The next challenge was building a product worthy of that signal. Something that didn't just engage users but gave organisations a new lens entirely: a Net Safety Score that could quantify behavioural risk and resilience for the first time.

THE ASK

Build the core product that scales, a design team from scratch. Conduct the foundational research, establish the UX frameworks, and create the conditions for good product thinking to take root in an organisation that was encountering it for the first time.

Quick questionnaires/surveys and interviews helped me gauge core market need, understanding two sets of

end-users, their challenges and context.

View Notion Doc

First draft of my questionnaire
(evolved to multiple versions over time)

Understanding the turf

  • What problem are we really solving?

  • Why does this problem exist?

  • Who does this problem affect and how?

  • How are we equipped to solve this?

  • What are core insights of our V1 App?

  • Do our Dashboard Users care about this problem?

Example Questions:

What we learnt

No way to measure Risk -

let alone predict it

Organisations tracked performance metrics but had no reliable way to quantify crew resilience - no score, no baseline, no way to act proactively.

Orgnisational Insight

The voice of the seafarer is effectively muted.

With no safe, direct channel to surface concerns, issues went unspoken. This compounded disengagement, eroding trust, and widening the gap between crew reality and org awareness.

User Insight

Solutions exist in the market but don't connect in any meaningful way



Emergency services, training programs, surveys - the tools exist but each worked in isolation, with no shared data, no continuity, and no way to build on each other.
continuity

Industry Insight

Interventions reached leadership -
not the crew.

Most existing initiatives like onboarding, training and surveys reached a maximum of 20% of leadership. The frontline workforce remained largely untouched.

Orgnisational Insight

2 in 3 wellbeing issues are work-related. None feel work-addressable.

Seafarers knew where the stress came from. What they lacked was any sense that the organisation could or would do something about it.

User Insight

Visibility stopped at the Vessel

Organisations had data on assets, routes and compliance. Almost none on the people operating them -their stress levels, engagement, or early warning signs of burnout.

Orgnisational Insight

Low utilisation is not apathy,
It's Friction.

Less than 6% of enterprises use emergency psychological support. Not because crews don't need it, but because the barriers to access like stigma, process, visibility. All made it effectively unreachable.

Industry Insight

Safety and wellbeing are treated as separate problems.

Mounting evidence shows a direct correlation between crew wellbeing and safety outcomes. Yet organisations continued to manage them through entirely different functions.

Industry Insight

A summary of issues, hurdles and limitations faced by the Industry and its workers. Utilising the findings from our own research, secondary research and business intel - we segregated our insights at Industry, Org and User level.

Explore Insights -

WHAT NEXT?

🛠️ bUILDING A HOMEPAGE That's

Modular

UX RETENTION GOALS

Familiarity over experimentation

Picking a Navigation Model That Scales

Mental Models Worth Keeping

Three thinking tools that actually got used in the wild and moved

things forward on the crazy days.

By asking the right questions

Getting my team to care about the problem

And when to not reinvent the wheel

My Decision Filter for Innovation

The WORKSHOPPING board

• APP BRIEF •

Build a multi-utility app that helps

Frontline workers cope with daily stressors and build resilience.

• APPROACH •

By helping Users identify their thresholds within 6 Wellbeing dimensions via -
• Direct psychological support
• Mindfulness exercsies
• Learning modules
• Cognitive games

Few key directions and themes started emerging

These rich features were then planned and built out over the course of coming months.

• THE STRATEGIC ANCHOR •

V1 had already shown us something valuable - Users spent significant time on the app voluntarily, offline, at sea. Some features had genuine traction and we let that behaviour lead. The new experience was anchored in

self-discovery and flexible engagement. Built for the reality of life at sea.

The truth about 0-1 journeys is that

they are messy and non-linear.

Being the first designer, new challenges arose every day.
I had to work with incredibly short timelines, speed and limited data.

QUESTIONS i WAS DEALING WITH

  • What kind of team do I need to hire?

  • What do we build in-house vs What to hire vendors for

  • What should be our Tool Stack?

  • How do we plan for Dashboard and Mobile work in parallel?

  • How do we plan for Dashboard and Mobile work in parallel?