Oceans apart brought together
About
MSC Cruises wanted to recognise and reward crew across a fast-growing fleet, and give employees at sea one place to connect with colleagues on other ships.
Challenge
Service quality varied widely from ship to ship, and crew in guest-facing roles had very little time to spend on their phones. The product had to make good service visible across the fleet, in moments that fit a working day at sea.
Outcome
We designed Shine, a mobile app where crew could recognise colleagues against MSC’s values, see what good service looked like on other ships and celebrate formal awards. The MVP launched in late 2019, months before COVID-19 halted cruising across the industry.
Overview
MSC Cruises was expanding its fleet quickly, and service quality varied widely between ships. Each vessel worked largely as its own echo chamber, so crew had no way of seeing how colleagues elsewhere were performing, and good work was easy to miss.
MSC came to us with two objectives: introduce a tool that recognised and rewarded employee performance, and connect crew across the fleet while at sea.
My role
I led the UX and UI design in a five-person Avvio Reply team, working with a project director, a project manager and engineering. Our client team was MSC’s head of communications and senior communications advisor. Avvio built the app in-house.
I ran the user research with the team and distilled it into personas. I then developed the information architecture, user flows and wireframes, created the high-fidelity designs and prototypes, and handed the final designs to engineering.
Research at sea
We started in Palma de Mallorca and spent three days aboard three MSC ships, interviewing crew in a range of roles, from Yacht Club butlers to guest relations and hotel managers. We turned the interviews into personas that kept the client and us anchored to real needs as the project developed.
One theme came up in almost every conversation. Crew in guest-facing roles could carry their phones, but had fleeting access to them, constant distractions and very little time to use them. That set the question for the whole project.
"How might we develop a tool that enriches an employee’s day-to-day at sea, whilst respecting their limited time?"
A shared benchmark
Connecting crew across ships meant they could see what good service looked like elsewhere, giving the whole fleet a common benchmark. Tying every recognition to one of MSC’s values made that standard explicit, and gave awards a fair and consistent basis.
Designing for limited time
The personas fed one overall user flow covering every critical action. We then broke it down into tasks for each persona and worked out how each could be done within the constraints we’d found on board.
Recognising a colleague became the core task, done in four steps: tap the rosette, choose a colleague, pick one of MSC’s values and add a short message. The post appears in the home feed, the recipient gets a notification, and others can add their support through likes and comments.
We’d planned direct and group messaging for launch, but cut it to keep the first version focused on recognition. Fewer features gave crew one clear reason to open the app.
Building on familiar patterns
Several of the crew we met found new interfaces frustrating, and few had time to learn one. So we built on patterns people already knew from social apps: a scrolling feed, likes, comments and notifications. That kept the learning curve low.
Familiar patterns helped the client too. The high-fidelity prototype felt like a real product, which made it easier for MSC to picture adoption and more willing to give feedback.
Launching in tiers
The MVP launched with Tier 1 features. A home feed let crew browse and react to posts, filtered by ship so they could follow the vessels that mattered to them. The ‘Create a post’ bar let them share their own moments or recognise a colleague. A fly-out menu held MSC’s core values and the formal awards given by each ship’s Captain and management team.
The design also included an admin back end, where managers would approve and moderate posts, though this wasn’t fully built out before launch.
Tier 2 was planned for after launch: messaging through single sign-on, fuller reporting, and changes driven by user feedback and usage data.
Outcome + Reflections
Shine launched in late 2019 with a positive launch campaign. Within months, COVID-19 had stopped cruising across the industry for more than a year, so its long-term impact was never measured.
Meeting crew on board shaped this project more than anything else. Seeing their working day first-hand made MSC’s values, and the limits on their time, concrete.
Even after cutting messaging, the MVP still tried to do several things at once. With hindsight, I’d launch with recognition alone and set a clear roadmap for adding features, so crew built the habit before the app grew.