Human-Centred Design in the Maritime Domain

emerging Updated: 2026-06-07
human-centred-design maritime e-navigation ecdis usability prototyping simulator-testing contextual-inquiry user-research professional-acceptance

Human-Centred Design in the Maritime Domain

Status: emerging
Last updated: 2026-06-07
Sources: Ds85_018.Pdf
Tags: [human-centred-design, maritime, e-navigation, ecdis, usability, prototyping, simulator-testing, contextual-inquiry, user-research, professional-acceptance]

Summary

Porathe (2016) describes how human-centred design (HCD) was applied across a decade of e-Navigation projects to develop bridge tools that mariners would accept and use safely. He frames the problem with the 2013 grounding of the tanker Ovit, where a complex ECDIS interface, left in default settings with its alarms disengaged, cancelled every warning the system could have given. The paper's contribution is methodological: it sets out six HCD methods — from interviews and onboard contextual inquiry to simulator usability tests, full system simulations, and sea trials — used to prototype and test six e-Navigation solutions. This work fed the IMO's 2015 decision to recommend HCD for all new navigation equipment, the first formal endorsement of HCD in maritime regulation.

Body

Context

Porathe (2016) examines how HCD methods were used to design e-Navigation services, presented at NordDesign 2016 from a product-design rather than a purely nautical perspective. The lens is applied design practice: the paper traces the lineage from wartime human factors through Scandinavian Cooperative, Participatory, and User-Centred Design to a "maritime flavour" of HCD aligned with ISO 9241-210, then shows that lineage at work in EU projects (PDF p. 3). Within this knowledge base the article is a domain case study that grounds the discipline's methods — it extends User Requirements Methods and Usability And User Experience into a safety-critical setting, connects to Representation Design through its graphical route-sharing displays, and complements the AI methods in Human Centered Design Of Ai. It is the HCD-owned counterpart to the maritime e-Navigation and autonomous-shipping material held in the maritime-domain and remote-operations knowledge bases.

Key Points

The motivating case is a usability failure, not an equipment failure. The chemical tanker Ovit ran aground on the Varne Bank in 2013 because the "check-route" warning was not understood and the ECDIS safety contour was left at its 30 m default with the alarm disengaged, which also rendered the dangerous bank almost invisible on the display. The UK MAIB noted this was the third ECDIS-related grounding it had investigated, with over thirty manufacturers each using their own interface design and little convergence (PDF p. 2). Porathe uses the case to argue that interface complexity, not operator stupidity, is the problem HCD must address.

Porathe situates maritime HCD historically. The realisation during the Second World War that even well-trained operators could be defeated by complex equipment led to fitting equipment to the person; the spread of computers and, later, GPS and electronic charts brought both real-time positioning and new complexity. Maritime work had no sustained tradition of involving users in equipment design, so the e-Navigation programme (launched by the IMO in 2006) deliberately required services to be user- rather than technology-driven. A maritime adaptation of ISO 9241-210 HCD was developed and refined in two e-Navigation HCD workshops, and in June 2015 the IMO Maritime Safety Committee approved a guideline (MSC.1/Circ.1512) endorsing HCD for e-Navigation (PDF p. 3).

The paper surveys six prototyped e-Navigation solutions, all tested first as low-fidelity prototypes and then in test-ECDIS in simulators or at sea: strategic route exchange (sharing voyage plans with a coordination centre), tactical route exchange (transmitting a few waypoints to nearby ships), suggested routes (a VTS sending a route segment to a ship's ECDIS instead of by radio), search-and-rescue patterns sent directly to the chart, and dynamic NoGo areas (real-time shallow-water polygons computed from draught and tide) (PDF pp. 4–6).

The methodological core is six HCD methods, ordered roughly from early to late design. Interviews and focus groups identify problems and capture requirements; contextual inquiry and field studies require the researcher to go to sea because much navigational knowledge is tacit; usability tests in bridge simulators allow immersion and controlled, replicable experiments; system simulations involve more than one live ship plus shore services to observe cooperation in a complex sociotechnical network; sea tests expose inventions to the real context under safe conditions; and surveys capture subjective reactions (PDF pp. 7–8). Because the maritime profession is conservative and resistant to change, Porathe's group developed a "Professional Acceptance Rating Scale" to ask directly whether a participant would accept using a tool in professional practice — used in both European and cross-cultural (Korean) studies (PDF p. 8).

Conclusion

Porathe (2016) concludes that HCD offers a workable answer to the bridge-usability problem the Ovit case exposes. Across the e-Navigation EU projects, prototype tools developed and tested with professional users earned good professional-acceptance scores, with participants agreeing that final decision authority should remain with the captain onboard. The practical significance is that this body of HCD work fed back to the IMO, which in 2015 agreed to recommend HCD for the development of new navigation equipment — the first formal endorsement of human-centred design in maritime regulation. The paper's lasting value here is as a catalogue of HCD methods proven in a safety-critical, hard-to-access domain.

References

International Maritime Organization (2015) Guideline on Software Quality Assurance and Human-Centred Design for e-Navigation (MSC.1/Circ.1512). London: IMO. To be validated.

Maritime Accident Investigation Branch (2014) Report on the investigation of the grounding of Ovit in the Dover Strait on 18 September 2013. Southampton: MAIB. To be validated.

Porathe, T. (2016) 'Human-Centred Design in the Maritime Domain', in Proceedings of NordDesign 2016, Volume 1. Trondheim, Norway, 10–12 August. The Design Society. porathe2016hcd

Open Questions

  • The paper reports good "professional acceptance" scores but does not give the scale's psychometric properties or quantitative results; the evidence for each solution lives in the cited project papers, none of which are yet held in RAW. Acquiring them would let the acceptance claims be validated.
  • HCD is credited with producing usable tools, yet the Ovit failure was partly a training-and-defaults problem. How far HCD of the interface, versus configuration policy and training, accounts for safe ECDIS use is not separated out.
  • The simulator and sea-test methods overlap with VR/simulation and bridge-simulator work in sibling knowledge bases. A cross-KB link to the virtual-environments material on bridge simulators would strengthen the methods section once that article exists.