Kirby Vessel Trip Monitor

An application for scheduling and tracking ships and barges on the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico.

Kirby Corporation is the premier tank barge operator in the United States, transporting bulk liquid products throughout the Mississippi River System, on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, and along all three U.S. Coasts.

The Problem: To track vessels, Kirby relied on various applications at different points in the journey, none of which were integrated or communicated to each other.

The solution: Create one tool that all user-types could access and track vessels through the entire voyage.

Challenges

Lack of access to users The stakeholders were in a rush to get a prototype together which did not allow our team time to conduct user interviews.
Solution: Since we were on-site at Kirby, we were able to track down employees who had been in the roles we were seeking to learn about. We had ad-hoc meetings with as many of these employees as possible and were able to put together some solid personas.

Results
Although the prototype never made it to production the team was able to exceed the clients expectations for what could be possible. This led to future work with the client.

Users: Voyage Manager, Account Manager, Captain, Business Manager

The Process: