Crafting cutting-edge tools to improve energy markets at Vortexa

Lead Product Designer, 2020 - 2021

Vortexa is a technology company that provides advanced analytics and real-time insights for the energy and shipping industries. Utilizing cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning, Vortexa delivers detailed data on the global flow of oil and gas, helping businesses make informed decisions on trading, shipping, and logistics.

The Vortexa product connects energy market professionals with essential knowledge to make informed decisions and drive business growth. As the Lead Designer, I collaborate with the product manager and R&D team to create valuable user experiences. My responsibilities include user research, personas, site maps, wireframes, user journeys, high-fidelity designs, prototypes, and user testing.

At Vortexa, a high-growth startup in the energy analytics space, I led the UX effort to create a next-generation freight intelligence product. During my tenure, the company tripled its revenue and secured $19M in funding — growth driven in part by our ability to deliver intuitive and scalable interfaces for complex data.

Realtime energy flows

Challenge

Freight charterers and shipping professionals faced an outdated and fragmented landscape of tools and spreadsheets.

Key pain points included:
- Navigating conflicting data sources with little cohesion.
- Lack of a centralized marketplace to compare vessel availability.
- High dependency on manual processes for critical logistics decisions.

Vortexa aimed to transform these inefficiencies into a product-led advantage.

Analytics dashboard

Objectives

- Establish Vortexa as the authority in freight analytics.
- Create a self-service SaaS model for real-time vessel intelligence.
- Enable users to understand and act on fleet distribution and congestion data.

This aligned directly with my role delivering UX strategy, design systems, and high-impact features during a critical scaling phase.

Congestion and port reports

Approach

🧠 Discovery & Framing
Using user interviews, heuristic analysis, and market benchmarking, we defined three core goals:
- Provide a complete picture of global vessel activity.
-Enable users to self-serve without relying on sales or support.
-Build trust in analytics through visual clarity and interaction precision.

💡 Ideation
We co-created with users across roles to define core journeys:
- Match vessels to cargo requirements through smart filters and availability data.
- Visualize port congestion and fleet dispersion with layered maps and timelines.
- Enable subscription, messaging, and dashboard sharing in-app.

⚙️ Execution
- Designed the Freight Analytics dashboard to offer real-time filtering, custom insights, and congestion alerts.
- Created the Marketplace MVP, iterating quickly using feedback loops.
- Built a scalable design system shared across engineering and product to ensure consistency across Vortexa’s expanding suite.

Freight marketplace user experience

Impact

🔥 100+ leads generated from product launch campaigns.
📈 8% increase in weekly active users after release.
🚢 18% boost in Freight Utilization adoption.
🎓 33% increase in learning engagement via VTX Academy.

These results directly contributed to Vortexa’s expansion into the U.S. and APAC markets and validated our user-first approach.

Vortexa's design system