PART ONE
Project Overview
PROJECT OVERVIEW
The Mission
The Global Yacht Charter Availability Calendar is a centralised platform connecting charter brokers and central agents through real-time yacht availability, verified listings, and direct inquiries. We’re on a mission to simplify and elevate the yacht charter process—especially across the Middle East and Asia—by offering seamless access to the region’s largest fleet.
Calendars gives retail brokers instant visibility into live CA-managed calendars, ensures listing accuracy through a thorough verification process, and enables effortless communication between brokers and central agents.
Company: Ankor Software
Role: Product Design Lead
Key Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end release to Open Beta
- Conduct user research with Customer Success and customer focus group
- Drove ideation with product team and final wireframing development.
- High fidelity design generation, interaction design and development documentation
- Design Quality assurance and testing with Beta customer group
- Deliver roadmap for further feature rollout.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
The opportunity
There’s a clear opportunity to build a modern, easy-to-use marketplace that connects agents and brokers, provides reliable real-time information, and makes the charter process smoother for everyone.
The superyacht charter industry needs a more accessible and user-friendly platform for central agents and charter brokers to work together. Current solutions are expensive, hard to use and make it difficult for many brokers to gain access. They’re also slow, with outdated interfaces and inaccurate content, which leads to frustration and wasted time.
User Sentiment
Business Impact
PROJECT OVERVIEW
The Impact
Calendars is now the largest luxury Yacht marketplace in the Asia Pacific area AND is the main revenue driver for our product suite.
Project Impact
- The platform hosts a whopping 8000+ Ankor managed yachs and 1,680+ central agent managed yachts with new listings being added daily.
- 70% of users reporting as promoters for the platform.
- Calendars now the largest luxury yacht database in Asia Pacific.
- 300+ Active Charter Broker Users
- 200+ Active Central Agent Users
Organisational Influence
- Now the largest generator of revenue for the company.
- Is driving sales through bundling for our other product suites
- Feeding content for our other products leading to more sales.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Design Process
I approached this design challenge with two different types of thinking:
- Divergent: keeping an open mind
- Convergent: narrowing down to the best idea
PART TWO
Discover
DISCOVER
User Personas
There are four key user groups for the application by interviewing a set of industry experts and customer support people across a variety of fields to understand the problem and build confidence in our direction.
Diagram depicting the relationship between a Charterer, a Charter Broker, a Central Agent and a Boat owner.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
How does the elusive world of Luxury yachting actually work?
When a guest or VIP—known as a charterer—wants to book a yacht trip, they typically reach out to a charter broker with their preferences and desired dates.
The charter broker then searches for suitable yachts and presents a selection to the charterer. Once the charterer selects a yacht, the broker contacts the central agent responsible for managing that particular vessel.
The central agent, who represents the yacht owner, handles the confirmation and coordination of the booking, ensuring all details are managed smoothly on behalf of the owner.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Key Insights
All design decisions were based on real quantitative and qualitative user data.
The Central agents are really slow getting back to me when I enquire on [REDACTED], especially when I have never worked with them before.
Charter Broker
It’s really important to double-check all the yacht details before showing anything to a client. Even something small, like a missing jet ski or promised feature, can seriously affect their trip. These are high-end bookings, and people expect everything to be exactly as described.
Charter Broker
Boat owners put alot of trust in us to bring in revenue and keep their vessels well maintained, so the work can be stressful at times. There isn’t a clear way for me to manage my yachts calendar and keep the various platforms up to date. Maintaining the yacht calendar is about 40% of my job.
Central agent
PART THREE
Discover
DISCOVER
Competitive Analysis
I evaluated industry standards and best practices for our competitors.
Key insights
- Most work B2B & offer Broker Only access
- Main Features: Search, filter, view Profile, enquire, generate brochure.
DISCOVER
Early Hypothesis
DISCOVER
Broker Parity
I conducted a card sorting workshop with 8 brokers.
Key insights
- Most participants aligned with the initial hypothesis.
- Some felt the dashboard should be postponed until there is more clarity on the data requirements.
- The majority believed that an in-app messaging feature might deter users, preferring a “copy central agent” email option instead.
PART FOUR
Define
DEFINE
Scope
An engineering-friendly Confluence document was created to outline the functional scope of the project. It detailed Day 1 features and identified planned features that may be confirmed for Day 2 of the platform.
Feature Match
- Search & Filter
- Yacht Profile
- Direct Enquiry
- Brochure generation
- Card View
- Table View
Point of differentiation
- API Integration
- Timeline View
- MMK Integration
- Noticeboard
Unpursued Features
- In App Messaging
- Mobile App
DEFINE
Wireframes
Each feature was carefully wireframed and then presented for critique to the product team and engineering team.
PART FIVE
Deliver
DELIVER
Design and Prototyping
A fully responsive interactive figma prototype was developed for the purpose of testing with a focus group of future users, troubleshooting engineering efforts and handover explanations.
Figma file coming soon.
DELIVER
Search & Filtering
Users can search by keyword or destination, then apply filters like yacht type, size, price, and availability to narrow results. They can browse detailed yacht profiles with images, features, and live availability.
DELIVER
Profile View & Enquiry
Users can click on any yacht to open its full profile, where they can view images, specifications, features, and live availability, then submit an enquiry directly to the Central Agent through a built-in contact form.
DELIVER
Brochure generation
Users can generate a broker friendly brochure with their logo, contact information and company colour to forward to their clients.
DELIVER
The Noticeboard
All users have the ability to post to the noticeboard. Central agents can make a post on the specials board when they wish to advertise a discount or deal, and the Charter Brokers can request charters if they have an urgent need to fill.
DELIVER
API Integration
I tested the prototype with a group of industry professionals, assessing how well they could navigate it, complete key tasks, and identifying areas that needed adjustments based on their feedback.
DELIVER
Product Demo
Watch me give a quick overview of the Calendars application.
DELIVER
Help Center & Knowledge base
I developed a onboarding curriculum with articles, demos and walkthrough. More videos in the works.
PART SIX
Next Steps
NEXT STEPS
Road to the largest Yacht Marketplace in the world
After the successful launch of Calendars, the team and I planned the next phase of development to grow the platform into the world’s leading luxury yacht marketplace.
Monitor help centre
Monitor help centre searches to improve content, address user pain points, and guide feature enhancements.
Drive user onboarding and adoption
Drive adoption through educational workshops, champions program, and incentives.
Monitor feedback
Provide feedback channels and actively review user critique about the app. Conduct more usability testing if necessary.
Measure Impact
Evaluate key metrics such as increased enquiries rates, yacht profile views, and brochure generations.
Build Video Content
Build video content that work in tandem with the help centre articles.
Drive feature request roadmap
Continue building, testing and refining feature roadmap and workflows within the app.
NEXT STEPS
Reflection
As Product Design lead for this application in the product team at Ankor Software, I drove the end-to-end release to Open Beta and further cusotmer rollout.
WENT WELL
Formative user research was executed early and captured key insights from design leadership
Progress over perfection This project focused on a key value which was progress over perfection. We didn’t aim to have a perfect platform built, we also didn’t aim to have an endless amount of features.
Flexible components We designed the platform to respond to changes in the future. We future proofed alot of the components we used as we knew changes were inevitable. This has meant tweeks to our platform have been smooth.
TO IMPROVE
Brochure design given the project experience again, I would have spent more time perfecting the brochure look and feel as this is the area where we receive the most customer complaints and requests.
In-app messaging:
While brokers didn’t see this feature as a priority, it would have solved key problems we’re now facing. Users are copying agent details and leaving the platform, making it hard to track enquiries, show value to central agents, or report on performance. Without messaging happening on the platform, we lose visibility and can’t prove Ankor’s impact. Platforms like Airbnb use in-app messaging for exactly this reason—to protect data, track activity, and support the business.
NEXT STEPS
Testimonials
We have some incredible momentum – this is the best period at Ankor since we have started (Because of Calendars) … we have to buckle down and take this momentum and kick arse … let’s go people.
Mike CEO
This is getting crazy! More inbounds from referrals from brokers in Monaco….. they are spreading the word. I just got a call from [REDACTED], and he signed up for Trips, I demoed Calendars and he asked for a bundle to finalise the deal.
Andy – Customer Success
Working with ANKOR has been an absolute pleasure. We love their modern, user-friendly interface—it’s refreshing to use a platform that feels current and easy to navigate… It’s been amazing to witness ANKOR’s growth and their dedication to filling a vital gap in the market by providing accessible, valuable resources to so many yachting professionals. We have signed up to their Itineraries, Retail and Central Agency (CA) services. ANKOR has become an essential part of our operations, and we couldn’t recommend them more highly!
Charter Broker – Mortlock Yachts
CONTACT
Copyright © 2024 Tiara Dobbs. All rights reserved.
Based in Sydney Australia.