BP p.l.c.

Fuel Supply Planning Platform

bp Midstream SPT — fuel supply planning dashboard with tank data, inventory grid, and nomination action modal

Role

Experience Designer

Team

1 Experience Designer

3 Engineers

2 Data Specialists

1 Product Owner

My contribution

Discovery & User Interviews

Co-design sessions with users

End-to-end product design

Timeline

18 Weeks

Overview

I led the experience strategy and end-to-end design for bp's Fuel Supply Planning Platform. It's the system supply planners and operational teams sit inside every day to coordinate fuel across the network.

The brief was to take a fragmented planning ecosystem and turn it into one cohesive experience. Reduce the complexity of high-pressure decisions, give planners better visibility into what's happening, and put in place a foundation the business could keep building on.

Challenge

Planning was spread across legacy tools, spreadsheets, and disconnected interfaces. Every system had its own logic and its own visual language, so planners were making time-critical decisions inside tools that lacked consistency, transparency, and basic usability. The cognitive load was heavy. The operational risk grew with it.

Solution

I led the experience strategy and a unified interaction framework that pulled operational workflows into one cohesive planning experience. Service design, systems thinking, and UX strategy worked together to cut complexity, sharpen efficiency, and create a foundation that future products in the ecosystem could plug into.

Brand utilisation

The platform supports time-sensitive decisions where errors carry real downstream cost. The experience needed to feel:

  • Calm under operational pressure
  • Clear and data-confident
  • Efficient without feeling robotic
  • Trustworthy for high-stakes decision-making
  • Consistent across complex workflows
  • Human-centred while supporting technical users

Across the visual and interaction language, clarity, hierarchy, and decision support came first. Decoration came second, if at all.

Aerial view of a bp container ship at sea with the brand statement Care for others overlaid
bp brand utilisation reference — BP Energy Experts campaign layout pairing facility, retail, and offshore imagery with brand statements

Research

I led discovery to understand fuel supply planning as it's actually practised, not as it's documented. Across 12 user interviews and 2 rounds of co-design sessions with planners, operations stakeholders, business analysts, and technical teams, we mapped the real workflows and the workarounds that had quietly become load-bearing.

What we learned

  • Critical information lived across disconnected platforms. Planners stitched it together from memory and habit.
  • Spreadsheets had become an unofficial source of truth. Fragile, duplicative, and high risk.
  • Workflows varied meaningfully between teams, but the interfaces treated them as identical.
  • Under time pressure, dense screens and inconsistent patterns added cognitive load instead of signal.
  • Planners wanted confidence in forecasting decisions. Not more features.

The work brought business and technical stakeholders around a shared view of operational complexity, and made the case for where experience improvements would do the most good.

User research summary — 12 user interviews and 2 co-design sessions, with quotes from Supply Operators and Co-ordinators on data trust, spreadsheet duplication, and the need for a single source of truth

Challenge

Fuel supply planning is unavoidably complex. Teams coordinate supply, logistics, operational constraints, forecasting, and shifting business conditions in real time. The toolset had grown incrementally over many years, and the experience had drifted with it.

  • Fragmented ecosystem. A single planning task could span several systems, spreadsheets, dashboards, and chat threads. Each with its own logic.
  • High cognitive load. Critical decisions were made quickly inside dense interfaces where the most important signal was often buried.
  • Lack of consistency. Different tools used different patterns, terminology, and visual structures. That slowed onboarding and eroded confidence over time.
  • Operational pressure. Time-sensitive decisions carry real downstream cost, so the experience needed to actively support clarity, not just contain information.
  • Scalability. New teams and workflows kept arriving. Any new design needed to make the system simpler as it grew, not more complex.

The real challenge wasn't redesigning a few screens. It was building a cohesive experience strategy that could hold usability, technical reality, and business-critical planning together inside one product.

Snapshot of the legacy planning surface — Comments thread, Tank Data and ULP chart, New contact modal, Move Vessel action, and a calendar picker spread across disconnected views

Design System

I introduced a systems-led approach so consistency and scale stopped being a per-screen negotiation. Shared foundations like tokens, patterns, components, and behaviours supported multiple operational products while staying flexible enough for domain-specific needs.

Core principles

  • Consistency at scale. Reusable patterns and layouts cut friction across workflows and made the product feel familiar even on first use.
  • Data-first design. Information hierarchy, readability, and operational clarity came ahead of decoration.
  • Reduced cognitive load. Standardised behaviours kept attention on the decision, not the system.
  • Modular architecture. Components and patterns built to evolve alongside future capabilities.
  • Cross-functional alignment. Built alongside product, engineering, and business stakeholders so it could ship realistically without watering down the experience.

The system worked as an operational framework. It made cohesive product experiences across the planning ecosystem possible, and it made them faster to ship.

bp brand colour ramp — eleven greens from G 900 to WHT alongside a brand poster reading Energizing the future of transportation with the words Energy, Drive, Ambition
Typography reference — Helvetica Now used across optical sizes for display and text, with a large E2 specimen

Solution

I led the end-to-end experience design that turned operational complexity into a single, unified planning surface. Clearer workflow structure, better data visibility, and more intuitive interaction patterns supported faster, more confident decisions.

What changed

  • A unified operational experience. Fragmented systems and external workarounds gave way to a connected planning environment.
  • Sharper information hierarchy. The operational signal planners actually act on came to the surface.
  • Simplified workflows. Fewer steps, less duplication, more flow.
  • Scalable foundations. Reusable experience patterns ready for the next set of products in the ecosystem.
  • Collaborative delivery. Built end-to-end with product, engineering, business, and operational teams.

The outcome

  • Less friction across the operational day.
  • Greater confidence in planning and forecasting activities.
  • Stronger alignment between teams and systems.
  • A scalable UX and design system foundation for what comes next.

The work showed how UX strategy, systems design, and a real grasp of operations can turn complex enterprise workflows into experiences that feel both human and trustworthy.

Midstream SPT terminal overview — welcome banner, terminal search, and an All terminals list sorted by last updated
Port Douglas planning view — Tank Data and Truck Lifting Average summary above a daily inventory and demand grid with embedded charts
What-if scenario view — inventory grid alongside an open Charts panel with ULP and PULP capacity charts and tracking deltas highlighted

Next Project

Carell