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Integrating digital user interfaces will save costs throughout the life cycle of a ship and contribute to safer and more efficient operations[ds_preview]

Digital user interfaces might not be the first thing that springs to mind when building or operating a ship. Yet, the fact is that digital technologies are increasingly affecting ship acquisition, operation, and maintenance. The user interfaces are the front-end meeting point between humans and digital technologies. If these do not work optimally across the organisation, it will affect the ability to harvest safety and profitability gains from your digital investment.

Suboptimal user interface design is often an invisible problem that can have large consequences when acquiring and operating a ship. This affects aspects such as operator training costs and effectiveness, contributory factors to incidents and accidents, operational efficiency, cost of equipment procurement purchases and product choice.

These challenges have increased in recent years as the digitalisation of the maritime sector has led to a rapidly increasing number of digital user interfaces onboard ships. A single bridge can have a dozen or more individual systems installed in a single bridge workplace. If one, in addition, includes the systems found in the multiple other locations around a ship or across a fleet, the number increases exponentially.

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Work in progress introducing OpenBridge to AR technology © AHO

Design consistency

The development of a ship is a tremendous effort carried out by a group of industry actors. As such, a ship owner is, in essence, a system integrator that organises assemblies of many systems that need to work together. This is also the case for the increasing number of digital systems that can be accessed in various places across the ship or on land. These digital services are designed and delivered by different companies with usually no coordination of user interface design. Maritime workplaces are, in many cases, effectively multi-vendor systems where many systems are assembled in a workplace to be operated by multiple users. Applying modern standards for user interface design cannot fix the problem since inconsistent design cannot be solved by improving individual systems. In effect, up until now, there has been no realistic pathway in the maritime sector towards coordinating design across a whole workplace, let alone a whole ship or a fleet.

Severely inconsistent design is less frequent in other domains where freely available design guidelines and design systems are widely used, and most applications share common design traits. Using commonly established design patterns, users already know how to perform basic interactions when engaging with a new product. If you learn how to use one interface, you gain generic knowledge that will make it much easier to use another interface built on the same principles. You also lower the risk of errors related to misunderstandings in how an interface functions. This lowers the learning and uses threshold of new systems, requiring less mental effort from its users and less time training and familiarising users to understand individual systems and their individual differences.

Solving a cross-industry challenge

Consistent design is an excellent convenience for the end user in most mainstream or consumer user interfaces. In the maritime sector, however, it is absolutely critical. A user often uses multiple applications simultaneously while operating safety and environmentally critical equipment. In everyday lives, users mostly use one application at a time and can reorient themselves when they switch an application. A maritime user, however, might need to use several conflicting design philosophies simultaneously.

All in all, maritime systems have been lacking two significant elements for achieving user-centred digital integration. First, it lacks guidance on how to design best practice user interfaces adapted to the maritime context. Second, it lacks frameworks allowing for the consistent design of user interfaces across any manufacturer.

A radical departure

OpenBridge is an initiative seeking to increase user-centred digitalisation for all maritime workplaces at sea and land. It was initiated in 2016 and has 27 members from the maritime industry, government, and academia. It launched the world’s first open-source maritime user interface design system in March 2020, and today, over 700 companies from over 50 countries ha registered to access the resource. A design system is a framework meant to reduce cost and increase design consistency by combining design guidelines with digital design and development tools. The OpenBridge Design System is a radical departure from current practice and enables user-centred digital integration across maritime systems.

The OpenBridge Design System is built on current state-of-the-art digital user interface design principles from the web and mobile industries adapted to the maritime domain. OpenBridge focuses on standardising the generic design of applications. This includes a standard application structure, styling, icons, and information visualisation. On a higher level, it standardises global functions such as multiscreen control, alert and dimming handling and, in some cases, provides standard reference designs for mandatory equipment such as ECDIS and RADAR.

Free and online

The OpenBridge design system is free and can be found online at www.openbridge.no. In addition to the online guideline, it includes digital tools directly supporting the design and development of OpenBridge compatible user interfaces. This greatly reduces the cost of using OpenBridge and increases design and development speed while guiding quality digital user interface design through its premade components. There are already several software packages on the market supporting the development of OpenBridge interfaces. Using these tools, the new software will inherently be compatible with other OpenBridge software and follow the maritime rules for palettes, readability, icons and clickable surfaces.

OpenBridge will, in most cases, help companies realise better user interfaces by offering components that represent industry best practice standards and reducing the work needed to create basic components, design patterns and palettes.

Improved user experience

There is a direct correlation between poor UI design and poor operator performance. Even the most cutting-edge system cannot be expected to work up to its specifications if its UI is not well designed. The good news is that it is easy to fix and will be cheaper than doing nothing. With OpenBridge compatible systems, the gap between the theoretical benefit of a new system and how it actually works will be significantly reduced because of improved usability and inter-industry design consistency.

Regulation and standards?

Maritime interfaces need to counter temporal impairments due to the shifting conditions at sea. In general, impairments are countered by applying design guidelines for accessibility. Maritime regulation does not account for this in current rules, and in effect, there are stricter rules for accessibility when making consumer interfaces than for maritime equipment. For example, in consumer interface development, strict and specific rules apply for contrast and readability. For maritime interfaces, very broad international standards apply, providing goal-based guidance but few details for designers to easily interpret or implement in practice. For instance, in the IEC 62288 standard, contrast demands are defined as »sufficient contrast«, with no details or guidance on how to achieve this stated goal.

OpenBridge counters this by appropriating web and mobile standards such as WCAG 2.0 and design patterns found in the leading, land-based design systems. These have been adapted to maritime-specific requirements such as day, night, and dusk and the need for optional physical interface redundancy. By applying these guidelines, user interfaces will help mitigate the effects of temporal impairments and, in general, improve the usability of the interfaces. This will help reduce accidents and increase efficiency.

Lower innovation costs

Modern user interfaces are much more detailed and advanced than previous generation systems. There are considerable resources needed to make a modern system, and for many companies, it might be very costly to develop and maintain such a system in-house. OpenBridge alone includes 760 user interface components with behaviour, not counting variations and colour files.

There is also special competence needed to develop a state-of-the-art design system. This involves different user-centred design traditions such as interaction, graphic and industrial design, as well as human factors specialists and front-end engineers. In addition to this, it is important to involve a wide range of users in the development as well as regulatory bodies. Very few maritime companies have the available resources to carry out such processes alone at a comprehensive level as part of their software development.

OpenBridge has met these challenges by applying open innovation processes supporting digital user interface development. First, the development has been led by experienced designers and researchers from Ocean industries concept lab, a leading design research group in Norway. This team has been supported by engineering competence from Sintef Ocean and human factors competence from the university of South-east Norway. This group has been supported by an extensive network of industry and government partners that each has contributed to parts of the whole system. Furthermore, since OpenBridge is an open system, a very large group of industry actors have had direct access and the ability to contribute to its development. This has given OpenBridge quality control throughout its continued development, which is uncommon in the maritime industry.

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Field studies on ships in operation looking at current interfaces © AHO

OpenBridge is not bound by regulatory ratification or a frozen guideline that is static and cannot further develop in a top-down approach, but instead driven by industry needs and thus much more dynamic and flexible compared to other approaches. As it continues to be developed, its quality will likely improve as more people get engaged in the development. Because of this process, it is likely that OpenBridge at least has equal or better rigour than existing maritime applications. And since it is decoupled from any specific product, it will continue to incrementally improve quality forward.

As digital integration is mainstreamed in the maritime industry, more and more companies are seeing that using a standard baseline interface guideline is opening their ability to focus on the core functional offering of their product. Using an existing system will save significant costs and most likely increase the quality of the resulting user interface, especially for companies without an entire design department.

Ease of learning and skill transfers

The lack of user interface standards in the maritime domain affects efficient training and familiarisation. The differences in how generic user interfaces are built in the maritime domain means that users need to learn different user interface philosophies for each equipment and combination of equipment that make up a single workplace (e.g., bridge). This challenge is largely mitigated by applying a common user interface design standard. The extreme realisation of this is seen in the aviation industry, where pilots are trained on particular aircraft models, and because of the design consistency across a particular Airbus or Boeing is identical, they can move between aircraft types. Moreover, if a user has encountered and learned how to use one OpenBridge interface, the knowledge of how to operate basic functionality can be transferred from one system to another. Buttons, alert handling, iconography, styles and many standard interaction patterns will be the same. This will allow the operator to focus on the system‘s core functions instead of learning a new interface philosophy.

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Illustration of OpenBridge components © AHO

Requirements specification

In modern software development and question, it is necessary to define usability requirements in the acquisition process to secure that the systems meet modern standards of user interface development. However, defining requirements that can be met within budget can be challenging in the maritime industry. Mainly because many system manufacturers do not have specialised human-centred design personnel or processes in-house. Some of these challenges can be reduced by using OpenBridge in the acquisition or design process. Since OpenBridge builds on state-of-the-art standards, a software following the guideline will follow the same standards too. That is not to say that all software that uses OpenBridge is well designed. However, they will at least meet a baseline of modern requirements so that the usability requirements can focus more on operational performance than contrast and readability.

At the level of ship design, when the ship owner is developing the list of specifications for a new ship together with the ship designer, the ship owner can ask for OpenBridge compatible systems. It is then up to the ship designer to find the appropriate systems. This simplifies the establishment of the specifications and saves time for both the ship owner and the ship developer.

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Components in OpenBridge Design System © AHO

Less cost of software development

Ship owners are increasingly developing their own software related to their operations that are used on land and on ships. Modern user interfaces generally have a higher standard than previous generations and require much more resources in development. It is common to underestimate the cost of developing the user interfaces of modern applications.

OpenBridge reduces cost in several main ways. First, it reduces the cost of developing user interface components and style sets. The system includes a vast library of all the components necessary for producing most ships‘ interfaces. Further, it reduces cost in implementation since the components are developed according to web standards that are well known and structured for export to developers. Further, the components are already integrated into third-party development tools, making it possible to develop production-ready interfaces using on-the-shelf software. The entire guideline is integrated into design tools, making it possible to sketch new interfaces using industry-leading design tools with no upfront cost. Finally, the system includes common design patterns and references designs for central applications, thus reducing the need to develop these parts from scratch. All in all, OpenBridge can significantly reduce investment in new interface development.

Freedom of choice

OpenBridge is still in an early stage where benefits mostly can be traced to more efficient design and improved usability of individual systems. However, as the number of OpenBridge systems increases in the maritime sector, the value of endorsing open innovation will increase significantly when acquiring or retrofitting ships. Since competing companies might deliver systems with a common baseline user interface, it will be possible to change or mix different systems while still maintaining interface consistency and, in extension, safety.

All in all, there is a tremendous value in applying an open standard to ships today to secure user-centred digitalisation. In effect, there are very few downsides to such an approach, and the entire premise rests on whether the open standard can deliver state-of-the-art user experiences. If it does, it will make it possible to achieve lower cost and higher quality even in standalone digital products. However, suppose it is adopted across systems. In that case, the benefits will increase significantly as one can take advantage of compatibility gains and reduced complexity in the entire value chain of digital products.

The added value

Our analyses show how open innovation and OpenBridge can bring value to the ship owner. This transition is already underway, and hundreds of maritime companies are already accessing OpenBridge. The entire chain of the maritime industry can benefit from this standard. However, the most considerable effect will be for Ship owners, who will see improvements to cost and efficiency across the entire lifecycle of the digital system.

The multiplication of individual benefits and savings per user interfaces will become significant at the level of a whole ship with the integration of numerous UIs. When integration spans several ships or an entire fleet, the benefits keep on adding up. Because each ship in a fleet will require the need for more management and data analysis from land-based operators, the benefits also add up on the land-based side of ship operations.

For the ship owner, we argue there is little risk in moving towards OpenBridge in their digital strategy. As demonstrated in this article, even a partial implementation of OpenBridge is still better than the status quo. On the other hand, if the industry at large embraces open innovation of user interfaces, we help free up resources now tied down to generic user interface development so we can focus on next-generation systems instead.

Author: Kjetil Nordby Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO)