Canadian Warship Technical Status Dashboard

Context

When the Royal Canadian Navy commissions new warships, maintaining their technical readiness over time is a complex, multi-party challenge. Thales Digital Solutions holds a long-term contract to maintain the technical readiness of several newly constructed Canadian warships; a mandate that requires tracking equipment status, logging maintenance activity, identifying what needs to be done, and demonstrating to the Navy that contractual obligations are being met.

At the time of this project, two ships were operational under the contract. The information needed to manage their readiness was distributed across two organizations with different roles, different data, and different needs. Thales needed visibility into technical status to manage their maintenance work. The Royal Canadian Navy needed confidence that the ships would be ready when missions required them.

A shared dashboard offered a solution, but only if it was designed around how both parties actually worked.

The Challenge

Building a dashboard for a single user type is straightforward. Building one that serves two distinct organizations (a defence contractor and the Royal Canadian Navy) with different professional contexts, different information needs, and different relationships to the data, is significantly more complex.

Thales technicians and managers needed to log maintenance activity, track outstanding work, and manage the technical state of each ship in operational detail. Naval officers, including the admiralty, needed a higher-level view: assurance that the ships were mission-ready, and transparent evidence that Thales was fulfilling their contractual responsibilities.

The dashboard had to serve both audiences without compromising the clarity or utility of either view.

The Approach

The project began with individual stakeholder interviews conducted separately with Thales personnel and Royal Canadian Navy representatives. These interviews established the distinct needs, mental models, and workflows of each user group before any design decisions were made.

The research culminated in a joint in-person workshop held in Halifax, bringing Thales and RCN stakeholders together to align on shared requirements and validate the direction of the project. Working with both parties in the same room, in a naval context, provided a level of grounding that remote or separate sessions could not have achieved.

From this research foundation, we developed the interaction design and visual design for the dashboard, covering:

• Technical readiness status across ship systems
• Maintenance logging and history
• Outstanding maintenance visibility and prioritization
• Mission readiness indicators for naval command

A guided high-fidelity Figma prototype was then presented separately to both Thales and RCN stakeholders for validation and allowing each group to evaluate the solution in the context of their own needs before the design was finalized.

The validated prototype served as the specification for a web application dashboard built as the first phase of what became a longer-term development initiative.

What the Work Produced

The research and design process produced a dashboard concept grounded in the real operational needs of both a defence contractor and the Royal Canadian Navy, balancing the detailed technical visibility Thales required with the mission-readiness assurance the Navy needed.

The high-fidelity prototype was validated with both user groups and used directly as the development specification for the web application. A research and design report documented the findings and rationale behind the design decisions.

This project was the first phase of a larger initiative. Subsequent development continued beyond this mandate.

Deliverables

• Stakeholder interviews with Thales personnel and Royal Canadian Navy representatives
• In-person joint workshop in Halifax with both organizations
• Interaction design and visual design for the technical status dashboard
• High-fidelity Figma prototype validated with both user groups
• Research and design report
• Prototype specification used for web application development

Project period: June 2022 — December 2022
Client: Thales Digital Solutions
End users: Thales technical personnel and Royal Canadian Navy officers
Language of work: French and English