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Fergal Keane
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Container vessel at sea with a global route network overlay

Insurtech

Real World

Powered by Skytek

Exposure, sanctions and live risk intelligence for (re)insurers, across eight lines of business in one platform.

  • Marine Hull
  • Marine War
  • Property
  • Aviation
  • Energy / Offshore
  • Ports & Terminals
  • Cargo
  • Cyber

Year

Ongoing

Role

Lead Product & UX Designer

I lead product and UX design on Real World. Since joining Skytek I have been redesigning it from its legacy system, working directly with company management and our largest clients.

Responsibilities
Product and UX design across the platform, the design system, and regular client sessions that turn the problems clients raise into working parts of the product.
Product
Skytek’s risk intelligence platform for (re)insurers: exposure aggregation, sanctions screening, live alerting and analytics across eight lines of business.
Users
Underwriters and risk managers working across marine, aviation, property, cargo and energy.

One book of risk, scattered across a dozen disconnected tools.

Before Real World, underwriters and risk managers tracked exposure across siloed spreadsheets and single-purpose tools. There was no single view of accumulated exposure, and live events (sanctions, AIS silence, severe weather, region breaches) surfaced too slowly to act on.

Eight asset classes that had to read as one product.

A vessel, an aircraft, a property and a cargo declaration carry different data and different risks. Each workspace had to fit its line of business closely, while a marine underwriter could still find their way around an aviation colleague’s screens without learning a new product.

One layout, learned once

The decision that shapes every screen in Real World is a shared layout. Portfolios sit on the left, aggregated exposure in the centre and live risk on the right, and every workspace follows the same drill-down path from portfolio to single asset. Someone who learns it in Marine can already read Aviation, Property and Cargo. The walkthrough follows that path through the main workspaces.

Unified Dashboard

The whole book at a glance

Before going into any one line of business, a risk manager needs to know where the whole book stands. The landing dashboard leads with four figures (total exposure, active policies, live risk alerts and global regions), then hands off to Marine, Property, Aviation and Offshore/Energy through large entry cards that show how many assets each one holds.

Global search

Global search for instant access to assets, portfolios, companies, etc. without navigating multiple screens.

Sidebar navigation

Persistent side navigation for quick access to key modules. Designed for faster switching between workflows.

Line-of-business cards

Quick access to core modules. Instant view of exposure in each line of business.

app.realworld.skytek.com / dashboard
Real World main dashboard overview

KPI summary

High-priority metrics help users understand business activity at a glance.

Optional add-on modules

Optional add-on modules for advanced functionality.

Marine

Fleet, vessel, voyage

Marine has the deepest drill-down in the platform, so it shows the shared path most clearly: from the fleet on a map, to one vessel’s full record, to cargo voyages screened against live tracking.

Fleet

The fleet on a map

The first question in marine is where the insured fleet is and which vessels need attention. Every vessel is plotted on a global chart. Selecting one opens a voyage card over the map, with route, speed, draught, flag and policy type. Above the map, portfolios, regional aggregation and a sanctions and AIS-silence alert rail run left to right, in the same order as every other workspace.

Design decision · Map and detail

Location is part of the risk in marine, so detail comes to the map rather than taking the underwriter away from it. The voyage card is a summary pinned to the vessel; the full record is one step further.

app.realworld.skytek.com / marine
Real World marine overview with live vessel map

Close-up · Voyage card

Route and timing

Origin, destination, departure time and ETA come first.

Policy context

Policy type sits with the live tracking data, so insurance context is read alongside the vessel’s movement.

Close-up of the voyage card for the vessel Atlantic Pearl, pinned to its position on the marine map

Full record, one step away

One link leads to the full vessel record, which keeps the card a summary rather than a second page.

Pinned to the vessel

The card stays pinned to the vessel’s marker, so its position on the map is never lost.

Vessel Detail

Everything known about a single hull

When a vessel needs a closer look, everything about it is on one page: policy details, port calls, a 0–100 risk score with its year-on-year trend, inspection history, CII environmental ratings and a scrubbable AIS track.

Design decision · Information density

This is the densest screen in the platform, so it is layered. The vessel and its sanctions status, the policy, recent port calls and the risk score sit in one row at the top. Inspections, affiliations, sanctions compliance, ship-to-ship and suspicious activity are grouped into tabs below, and the AIS track closes the page with a timeline for replaying movements.

app.realworld.skytek.com / marine / vessel
Real World vessel detail page for Fresh Breeze

Cargo

Declarations screened against AIS

Cargo work starts from a declarations workbook, not a map. The workflow takes the uploaded workbook and screens every vessel in it against AIS, checking voyage progress and whether it has left its stated region. Voyages roll up into completed, started, pending and breached, and each route can be opened on the map.

app.realworld.skytek.com / cargo
Real World cargo voyage analysis

Aviation

The same layout, a different asset class

Aviation is where the shared layout is tested. It has to hold up for aircraft and airports as well as it does for ships.

Airports and aircraft

From global airspace to a single gate

Aircraft and airports carry different data from vessels, but the screen reads in the same order. Exposure is grouped by airport and region, live NOTAMs and risk-area levels take the live-risk position, and an airport drill-down shows aircraft on the ground, incoming traffic and summary statistics over a satellite view.

Design decision · Consistency

With eight workspaces, consistency had to be structural rather than cosmetic. Aviation keeps the marine order of portfolio, exposure and live risk, with NOTAMs and risk-area levels in the place sanctions and AIS alerts hold in marine, so someone moving between workspaces already knows where to look.

app.realworld.skytek.com / aviation
Real World aviation overview

The airport view answers the underwriter’s real question: how much value is sitting on the ground right now? It answers with portfolio aircraft, exposure by coverage type and a live map of arriving and parked aircraft.

/ aviation / LAX
Real World airport detail for Los Angeles International

One level deeper, the aircraft record carries hull and liability values, operator and lease details, utilisation and maintenance status, and the airports it has recently touched, so a single tail number can be assessed without leaving the workspace.

/ aviation / aircraft
Real World aircraft detail page with flight track and specifications

Property and Nat Cat

Before and after an event

Property risk is mostly about where the value sits. These two views follow it from exposure on a map before an event to damage assessment after one.

Property

Catastrophe exposure, geolocated

For property, location is the risk. The workspace maps insured value against high-value markets and live weather risk across wildfire zones, hurricane tracks and seismic zones, so a concentration of value in a cat-exposed region is visible as soon as it crosses a threshold.

app.realworld.skytek.com / property
Real World property overview with weather risk

Opening a single property gives valuation, construction year and portfolio membership alongside a satellite location view, current conditions and a risk radar that flags live weather threats to that exact address.

/ property / details
Real World property detail page with location, weather and risk radar

Nat Cat Events

Damage assessed from orbit

After an event, the question is which insured properties are affected and how badly. The view lays the hazard perimeter over post-event satellite imagery, grades every property inside it from undamaged to completely destroyed, and lists the insured addresses within the footprint with an RDS classification and exposure figure. It covers wildfires, windstorms, earthquakes, floods and tropical cyclones.

/ nat-cat / event
Real World nat cat event detail showing the Los Angeles wildfire perimeter and affected properties

Zooming to an individual address swaps the map for a draggable before-and-after comparison, so an adjuster can confirm the state of a single roof against pre-event imagery without leaving the claim.

/ nat-cat / event / property
Before and after satellite comparison for a property inside the fire perimeter

One language, eight workspaces

Eight workspaces only read as one product if they are built from the same parts. I kept the foundation small: one palette, two typefaces, an 8px spacing scale, six core components and one set of interaction states. Because tables, cards, inputs and alerts behave the same way in every workspace, moving from a marine view to a property view does not mean relearning anything, and a ninth line of business can be built from existing parts.

Palette
Brand
Slate
Success
Warning
Danger
Surface
Typography

Exo, Heading

Exo Medium, Subheading

Inter Regular, body and tabular data at 14px, tuned for dense exposure tables.

Spacing

8px base step, 8 / 16 / 24 / 32 / 48

Core Components
Primary button
Secondary button
Text input
IMO 9548843
Dropdown
Marine Hull
Card
Total exposureAggregated, live
Data table row
MSC Aurora9548843
States
Default
Hover
Disabled
Focus
Principles
ConsistencyOne pattern per job, reused everywhere.
ClarityThe number first, the chrome second.
ScalabilityA ninth line of business adds no new parts.

What the work comes down to

The difficulty in Real World was never a single screen. It was eight specialist workspaces, each with its own data and its own way of going wrong, that had to read as one product while an event is unfolding.

My approach has been to solve that structurally rather than screen by screen. Patterns are decided once and reused, so a new line of business inherits a layout, an alert position and a set of components instead of starting from a blank page. Much of what has been added since the redesign began as a problem a client brought to us, and the structure’s job is to absorb those requests without making the product harder to learn.

  • 8Lines of business on one design system
  • Award-winningRecognised with numerous industry awards
  • In the newsReal World intelligence is regularly cited in news coverage
  • GrowthMore clients, more functionality, and a significantly larger company

The work is ongoing, so this case study shows Real World as it stands today.

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© 2026 Design by Fergal Keane

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