Nova Safe: Maritime Safety Management
Hillestad Digital Design AS is a company in Norway that provides solutions to a variety of clients with complex data entry needs. One of their most significant projects, Nova Safe, is a safety management system for Norwegian boat crews to log their maintenance work, manage their safety routines, and ensure compliance with established safety regulations.
the challenge
Simplifying safety management
When Hillestad decided to upgrade the Nova Safe safety management system, they faced an extensive list of requirements dictated by the regulations and realities of the Norwegian maritime business. These complex requirements were expected to change constantly, meaning that any system they built could be obsolete by the time it was complete. Acknowledging that the needs for this project were significant, the team recognized that this upgrade could be costly.
Sector
- Health
Service
- Strategy
- User Experience
- Design
- Development
Technology
- Drupal
- React
The Solution
Building on a lasting partnership
Hillestad started working with Affinity Bridge in 2015 because of our extensive experience with Drupal. Over the years we have built a strong partnership, supporting their complex technical needs and expansive digital ecosystem. Because of this, when it was time for them to overhaul the Nova Safe safety management system, they came to us.
Their deep knowledge of the maritime safety management business informed our recommendations, as we interpreted the project requirements and worked within the regulations to build a stable, user-friendly and performant platform. Over the years, the Agile development approach has provided a robust and cost-effective framework for developing this complex project to fit its user’s needs. Leveraging this methodology, we were able to help keep costs down. Our team was able to provide thorough, thoughtful technical planning and ongoing assessments across sprint planning and reviews, only pursuing features that supported the highest value objectives for the upgraded system.
Fleet management
First and foremost, Nova Safe needed to be a tool for the people using it: a data-entry interface and intranet of reference documents and company communications. It also needed to be a fleet management tool, providing an overview for managers that showed how workers had progressed on their tasks and a summary of any outstanding problems across all the ships in their company’s fleet.
In technical terms, Nova Safe provides this overview through its main menu. The menu is built in React.js, which constantly pulls fresh information from the database. The system displays problems across all departments, including the number of unclosed trouble reports, overdue jobs, and workers missing required certification documents on file. Managers can track the issues to the individual vessels and take action.
The maintenance tree
Most of the work at sea focuses on the ship’s mechanical equipment. Workers must closely track the ongoing maintenance, and the authorities require careful documentation of this. Nova Safe’s central worker tool is the Equipment Tree. It portrays all the equipment on board in an expandable/collapsible view so users can focus on a specific section or the entire machinery tree. The system also tracks every job the workers must do, including information on when those jobs are due or overdue. This information is available so managers can see at a glance which section of the ship has overdue or problematic tasks.
Tracking rest hours
One of the Norwegian Maritime Authority’s most important safety regulations requires monitoring worker rest hours to ensure that sailors aren’t engaged in high-risk work while exhausted. This regulation is vitally important but was challenging to comply with given the need to meet rigorous parameters. Managers must ensure that each worker gets enough rest according to a system of rules that specifies minimum rest hours per day and week, minimum lengths of rest periods, and a maximum number of work periods per day. Previously, their only option was to log this information on graph paper and manually verify compliance. We developed a React.js widget to do this work for them, enabling workers to easily input their data through an intuitive click-and-drag interface that highlights any inputs that do not meet regulatory standards. The Norwegian Maritime Authority safety inspectors have praised our Rest Hours data entry tool as the best on the market.
If you enjoy getting into all the technical details, we’ve got you covered. Read on to learn more about how we overcame the challenges to deliver a performant platform that continues to evolve with its growing user base.
Data migration
Nova Safe was a replacement for an earlier app and a significant part of this upgrade was to revamp the platform’s data structure. The original app had an unnecessarily large number of content types with thousands of fields, permissions were scattered across nearly 50 different group roles, and there were inconsistencies in the data structure that had been coded around, leading to inefficient queries that resulted in poor performance.
On the new restructured Nova Safe platform, the number of different user access roles and data structures has been reduced down to exactly what is really needed: 7 roles instead of 49, and 25 content types instead of 100. All other valuable data was moved into webforms for customers to modify themselves.
Performance
Nova Safe needed to have an extremely complex data structure, with 30 content types thickly interconnected by reference fields, 25 types of logs, hundreds of user groups, thousands of users who can have different privilege levels in their various groups, and 3500 unique per-group checklists and forms. The previous app suffered very slow performance running complex database queries to pull appropriate page content from all this data - and it wasn't even as complex as Nova Safe needed to be. So when we started designing Nova Safe’s technical architecture, we took the following approaches to keep performance fast:
- more consistent data structure, to make queries simpler
- a lightweight front-end with minimal animation
- lazy-loading on listings
- a design that avoids rendering unneeded listings
- making documents open in modals, to save on full page reloads
- generous CPU power at launch time, later revised downward after ensuring it was adequate for real-world use.
While the previous app was so slow that users joked about making a cup of tea while waiting for a page to load, Nova Safe has continued to run with faultless performance since launch, while the user base increased from 3000 to 6000 in just two years.
The language challenge
How can a team of English-speaking developers build and maintain a website entirely in Norwegian, a language they don't understand? Answer: A combination of technology and procedure.
Technology: We used Drupal's interface-language tools. We set English as the site's default language, and also enabled Norwegian. We set up the site so that when a user logs in, their personal language setting determines which language the interface is served in. Then, because it was assumed that most users would be native Norwegian speakers, we set Norwegian as the default language for all new user accounts.
Procedure: After building the site entirely in English, shortly before launch we exported all untranslated UI strings and translated them from English to Norwegian using an automatic translator program. Our Norwegian-speaking client was then able to sanity-check the language in place. As we continue to build and develop, we do so in English, adding the Norwegian translations as needed through Drupal's UI string configuration page.
Given their depth of investment in the project, it’s no surprise that our developers learned quite a bit of Norwegian along the way, too.
Re-imagining the navigation
The previous application had a frustrating interface problem. Users wanted to work through lists of tasks, addressing each task and then moving on to the next one. However, it was necessary to click away from the listings to work on each task, and then finding their way back to the listing could take as many as ten clicks. On Nova Safe, when a user clicks on an individual task, it opens in a modal, where they have all the tools necessary to work on that task including the ability to edit it, sign it, postpone it, translate it, transfer it to another group, audit its logs, or reassign it to someone else. When they close the modal, the React-powered listing instantly refreshes to show changes. The process makes work smooth, and also continuously offers up-to-date information.
Building for the long-term
Through extensive technical planning and collaboration, we embraced a truly user-centric approach for the design and build of the Nova Safe platform. With a significant and growing number of users and complex requirements, Nova Safe demonstrates the power of technology to serve multifaceted and intricate functionality in a way that is seamless and user-friendly.
