SeaMS — by Carnival Cruise Lines (B2B / SAAS)
SeaMS. Voyage Logistics — Crew & Operations Dashboard for Carnival Cruise Line (Data visualization for mission-critical scheduling)
services
Sr Product Designer
client
Carnival Cruise Lines
year
12 months (2024)
category
B2B, SaaS (desktop / Kiosks)
Agency
IntegrisGroup.com
My Role:
As the lead UX/UI designer embedded within the product team, I owned the end-to-end design process — from stakeholder discovery and requirements alignment across corporate and operational teams, to information architecture, interaction design, and executive presentation of the design direction.
This meant navigating competing priorities across organizational levels, translating dense operational logic into interfaces that felt immediate and intuitive, and building the design case for strategic decisions with audiences who think in business outcomes — not pixels.
Challenge:
Design an enterprise operations dashboard — SeaMS — that would serve two fundamentally different users with one coherent product:
Crew onboard needed ground-level clarity: their own schedules, port call timelines, and task-level logistics presented without noise, accessible in high-pressure, time-sensitive environments.
C-suite and shore operations leadership needed strategic altitude: fleet-wide visibility, scheduling conflict detection, and a single source of operational truth that could support decisions at scale — without requiring them to dig through operational detail to find it.
The core tension: depth vs. clarity. Operational granularity for crew. Strategic legibility for executives. One system. Two realities.
This wasn’t just a dashboard problem. It was a product architecture problem — how do you design a multi-role enterprise tool that doesn’t collapse under the weight of its own complexity, and doesn’t dumb itself down trying to serve everyone?
Context:
Carnival Cruise Line operates one of the most complex logistics ecosystems in the world — a fleet of vessels moving across international ports, each voyage carrying thousands of guests, hundreds of crew members, and a dense web of interdependent operational schedules.Behind every seamless guest experience is an invisible layer of coordination: port calls timed to the minute, crew rotations managed across time zones, ticketing logistics synchronized between onboard teams and corporate shore operations.That coordination was breaking down.
Problem:
Shore operations teams and onboard crew were managing voyage schedules, port call logistics, and ticketing workflows across disconnected systems — spreadsheets, email chains, and siloed internal tools that didn’t speak to each other.
The result was predictable: scheduling conflicts surfaced late, manual intervention was constant, and decision-making at the executive level was driven by lagging, incomplete information rather than live operational data.
The business wasn’t lacking data. It was lacking visibility.
Leadership couldn’t see the fleet. Operations couldn’t act fast enough. And crew on the ground were absorbing the friction that the system should have been handling.
What I led:
- Design for voyage planning flows, data visualizations for crew scheduling and ticketing logistics.
- Designed interactive filters, timeline visualizations and printable manifests.
- User reseach and investigation through shadowing and observation, users testing and data from BI
Outcome / Impact:
- Projected time saved per operation day: 24% measurement plan: time tracked 34hrs to 44hrs/4hrs.
- Reduce manual scheduling time by 50% (baseline = ~3 hrs/day).
- Qualitative: Operations managers report faster access to real-time changes.
- Interactive timeline mockup showing drag/drop rescheduling.
- Sample printable manifest PDF.
- Reduce errors in passenger manifests by 16% (measurement via error log).
Design process
More Details
Users & evidence:
- Personas: “Operations Manager — Tom” and “On-board Coordinator — Ana”.
- Key insight: ops staff spent 3–4 hours daily collating emails and spreadsheets.
Process & artifacts:
- Customer journey map of pre-sail checklist, wireframes of timeline calendar, hi-fi interactive visuals for voyage timeline.
- Mind map for data sources + mapping of KPIs.
The Team:
I was a product designer, designing the app including UX and UI and delivering figma files for discovery, user testing files and prototypes to a design principal.
Toolbox:
Figma, ChatGPT, Figjam, Teams, Illustrator, DevOps.
