Running UX research interviews with fleet directors

Maritime website redesigns are routinely commissioned without speaking to a single one of the people the site is meant to serve. The marketing director’s instinct, the agency’s design taste and the CEO’s brother-in-law’s opinion combine into a brief, and a year later the site looks updated and converts no better than the old one. The gap is research.

UX research with fleet directors, technical superintendents, port operators and procurement leads is doable, valuable and rarer than it should be. Done well, it changes both what the site says and how it’s structured. Done badly, it produces 40 pages of transcript that nobody reads.

What you’re actually trying to learn

Three things, in this order:

1. What do they look for, and where do they look? When a fleet director needs a new technical manager, ship chandler or class society, what’s the actual information journey? Google? LinkedIn? A trade publication? A conference contact? The website is just one stop in that journey, and you need to know which stop it is.

2. What signals credibility? Specific, not generic. “Trust” doesn’t mean anything until you ask “what would make you confident enough to put us on a shortlist of three?”.

3. What kills a shortlist position? This is the most useful question. The reasons a buyer drops a vendor at the website stage are concrete and underweighted in marketing strategy. Stale fleet data. A 2017 case study. No mention of EU ETS readiness. A list of “global presence” in 30 cities that turns out to be agents, not offices.

Recruiting the right people

The hardest part. Fleet directors don’t respond to LinkedIn cold messages from research agencies. They do respond to:

• Existing clients. A current client is the easiest interviewee, with the caveat that they’re biased favourable. Useful for understanding what worked, less useful for understanding why others didn’t engage.

• Lost-deal contacts. A buyer who shortlisted you and went elsewhere is gold. They’ve evaluated you and rejected you, and they generally know exactly why. The conversation needs to be framed as “we want to learn”, not “we want a second chance”.

• Sector-aligned non-buyers. A fleet director at a target client who’s never been in your pipeline. Hardest to recruit but most representative of the buyer you’re trying to attract. A trade-association introduction or a paid market research recruiter (£300 to £600 per interview) gets you there.

Aim for six to ten interviews. Below six and you don’t see patterns. Above ten and the marginal insight per interview drops fast.

Running the interview

45 minutes, video call, recorded with consent. A semi-structured discussion guide of around 12 questions, with permission to deviate when something interesting opens up.

Useful questions:

• “Walk me through the last time you needed to find a new [supplier type]. Where did you start?”
• “Whose websites do you remember as good in our sector? Why?”
• “When you arrive on a vendor’s site for the first time, what do you check first?”
• “What makes you close a tab in the first 10 seconds?”
• “If you had to recommend two ship managers to a peer this week, what would you tell them about each?”
• “What’s the difference between a website that looks credible and one that just looks polished?”

Avoid leading questions. Avoid asking buyers to design the solution (“what would you like the homepage to do?”); they’re not designers, and the answers are not actionable.

What to do with the data

Three artefacts, none of them a 40-page report nobody reads.

A buyer-language vocabulary list

Every term, phrase or framing the interviewees used to describe what you do, what they care about, what they look for. This goes straight into copy briefs, SEO targeting and headline writing. If three out of seven fleet directors used the phrase “in-house technical superintendence” and your website says “fully integrated technical management capability”, the buyer-language version wins.

A buyer-journey map

Plot the actual journey, with sources, content types, decision points and friction. Mark which stages your site currently serves well and which it doesn’t. Most maritime sites are over-invested in the awareness stage and under-invested in the shortlist-validation stage; the research will surface this if it’s true for you.

A “shortlist disqualifiers” list

Concrete, ranked. The things that took you off shortlists. This list usually contains five to fifteen items, half of which are website fixes (stale content, missing accreditations, weak case studies, slow load) and half of which are deeper (no Asia presence, no LNG fleet experience, no LR class). The website-fix items go straight into the brief.

A note on cost

You can run a credible UX research programme for a maritime redesign for £8 to £15K end to end, including recruitment incentives. That’s typically 5 to 10% of the redesign budget. The decisions it changes are usually worth more than the rest of the build cost combined, because they’re decisions about content and structure, which is what actually drives conversion.

A maritime redesign without research is a roll of the dice with experienced taste behind it. Sometimes the dice land well. Doing the research is how you stop relying on the dice.