61.2970°N 23.5025°E
Tel. +358 50 433 7843
Email sami@bumblebee.fi
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© Sami Surakka 2025
Work/Groke Fleet
2022, 2023 ✦ Product designer
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61.2970°N 23.5025°E
© Sami Surakka 2025
Problem
Shore operators had no way to monitor multiple vessels and spot risks at fleet scale.
Solution
A fleet overview that surfaces risks first, then lets operators drill into vessel-level detail. Nominated for Red Dot Design Award.
As an extension of Groke Pro, Groke Fleet provides fleet operators a real-time overview of vessels and voyage data. I designed the system's user experience and visual interface, focusing on surfacing the right information at the right time. The challenge was to make complex spatial and sensor data readable and actionable from a distance over multiple vessels. Although the company ultimately chose not to redeem the award, Groke Fleet received a Red Dot nomination, recognizing its thoughtful and cohesive design.
Video courtesy of Groke.
In collaboration with Mikko McMenamin, Jari Ijäs and Iiro Lindborg.
In commemoration of Iiro.
Before Sami joined, the design work was expensive and significantly slower. With Sami's help, Groke's design process became twice as fast and half as costly.
Juha Rokka, CEO @ Groke Technologies
Groke Pro, the onboard product, already provided rich situational‑awareness data for individual vessels. The next step was to leverage that edge at the fleet level: giving shore‑side operators a way to see and understand what was happening across multiple vessels at once. Existing tools made it hard to interpret complex spatial and sensor data in a way that supported fleet‑wide optimization and safety decisions, rather than just narrow resource allocation.
I designed Groke Fleet to start with a clear fleet overview that highlights potential problems and risks, then let operators drill down into specific vessels and events. The interface focuses on surfacing the “need‑to‑know” signals first, using hierarchy, grouping, and carefully chosen visual emphasis so that issues stand out without overwhelming the user. From there, operators can explore timelines and historical data to understand what actually happened in an incident, supporting both real‑time decisions and post‑event analysis.
Groke Fleet received a Red Dot Design Award nomination, recognizing the thoughtfulness and cohesion of the design, even though the company ultimately decided not to redeem the award. Beyond the nomination, I don’t have detailed insight into adoption or operational metrics after handoff, but the project remains one of the clearest expressions of how to make complex, sensor‑driven data readable and actionable at scale. The same design language was also used in internal tools and in Groke's brand and presentation materials.
I created the initial concept and UX based on a workshop with Iiro Lindborg and Mikko McMenamin, drawing heavily on earlier UX research and competitor analysis. I then collaborated with the broader team to refine the interaction model and visual design so it worked for real operating environments.
Alongside Groke Pro, Groke Fleet is one of the projects I’m most proud of. It represents a full arc: from identifying a strategic opportunity, to designing a new way of seeing a fleet, to having that work recognized externally. It also reinforced how valuable it is to pair deep domain insight with strong visual and interaction design when dealing with high‑stakes, data‑heavy contexts.