Steamship Authority, through Stellar Elements · 2021 to 2023
The Steamship Authority runs the ferries to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, about 3.5 million passengers a year. It had never asked riders what they thought. I ran about 100 interviews in a month, found four kinds of traveler, and led the rebuild of booking around them. In usability testing, the Customer Effort Score improved 65%.
What I walked into
It turns into lines at the terminal and calls the agents have to absorb. Riders had to work out pricing rules and vehicle options they didn’t know, at the moment the stakes felt highest, and the site was weakest on the phones they were traveling with.
The riders weren’t one group. Frequent travelers wanted speed. Occasional travelers needed guidance. Agents and operations staff carried whatever the site got wrong. So the research sorted riders by what they were trying to do, and the redesign answered the moments they kept describing.
“Oftentimes, I’m trying to change a reservation en route… and I’ve got my laptop in the car and I’m trying to open it up and it’s like a mess.”Frequent traveler, research interview
What we designed
Changing plans in the car
The rider in the quote gets the day’s sailings on the phone, with the boat for each one and the current trip marked. A row of dates moves the search a day at a time. If the sailing they want is full, the waitlist is one tap away.
A sold-out sailing
Riders set the dates and the window of times they could take, and how long to keep looking. The waitlist keeps searching and moves the reservation on its own when a seat opens. The checkbox says exactly that, so nobody is surprised by a changed trip.
The day of travel
How long is the standby line, is my boat on time, which lot is open. The homepage answers all three for whichever island you pick, with the delay and the new time spelled out.
The regular
A saved default trip turns booking the usual route into one choice. In the app, My Travel opens on the next reservation, with tickets, ticket books, parking permits and gift cards a tap below.
What testing said
What I learned
Every screen above answers a moment riders described under pressure, in the car, on a sold-out day or in the standby line. A flow that only works on a calm Tuesday in March fails the people who need it most.
A better site can quietly move work onto agents. I documented how agents and operations staff handle peak season and designed a tooling concept for them alongside the rider flows, so the effort we removed for riders didn’t just land on staff.
Call drivers, abandonment reasons and peak-season handling time would have shown effort moving through the whole system. When teams can see that, debates get shorter.
Designed with the Stellar Elements team. The screens are from the signed-off design files, with sample data.