Fjordline planning board

Fjordline builds software for ferry and coastal shipping operators. Their planning tool had grown for eight years without a designer, and dispatchers used it the way you use an old car: carefully, and with a lot of workarounds.

The problem

Every morning a dispatcher assembles the day: vessels, crews, slots, weather exceptions. The old tool showed this as a 40-column table. Finding a conflict meant scrolling, sorting, exporting to Excel and coming back. We counted 11 tabs open on an average screen.

What we did

We spent the first three weeks on board two ferries and in three control rooms. The insight that shaped everything: dispatchers think in lanes (one vessel, one day), not in rows. So the board became a timeline with one lane per vessel, where crews and slots are blocks you can drag.

• Conflicts surface themselves. Overlaps, missing certifications and rest-time violations show as a red edge on the block, with the reason one hover away.

• Changes propagate. Moving a departure shifts crew pickups, port slots and passenger notices, with a preview before you commit.

• The table stayed. For audits and exports, a table view sits one toggle away and shares the same filters.

Design system work

The board needed density the existing system did not have. I added a compact scale (12 px type, 28 px rows), a colour language for block states, and a set of keyboard shortcuts documented right inside the product.

Results

Six months after launch, planning time per route dropped from 26 to 16 minutes on average, and support tickets about scheduling halved. The most common piece of feedback was not about speed but about calm: "I can see the whole day."