GE Aviation: Engineering Suite Redesign
Introduction
When I worked on it, the internal engineering suite at GE Aviation was the most used collection of applications throughout the entire company across the world, both internally and externally. This suite included everything from supply chain to manufacturing and monitoring apps with a multitude of different user groups. I lead the design team of 5 designers and 2 researchers in charge of updating a number of these applications, but as we learned more from the users we realized that simply updating the apps themselves wouldn’t solve the underlying issue. When put on a task force with a number of stakeholders in leadership to hit a number of critical KPI’s for the company, I ran a design thinking session which outcome lead directly to creating the eventual prototype that hits the key user needs while also addressing those KPI’s.
Requirements and Data Gathering
While running the design thinking session with the team, I remained focus on our engineering users as they were our largest subset. As a result of that, we were able to identify the key pain points of the current process: users must go from app to app to app after referencing emails and conversations with their manager in order to prioritize work that may change by the hour. This not only lead to inefficiencies, but also work that should have been a priority slipping through the cracks and slower turn around time for completion. A number of reasons contributed to this; there was confusion between tasks and notifications within the system as well as silo’d applications and navigation and IA that is confusing and required multiple training sessions in order to grasp. Additionally, the application suite itself was entirely reliant on user set-up, creating issues for users without intimate knowledge of the application as well as a number of inconsistencies across both the setup as well as the apps themselves.
‘Current State’ Sample if we were to prioritize the IA of the overall app suite without changing the content
Updated IA to include a task-based system more similar to the way the users operate today
A Future-state look into if we revamped the entire application suite to integrate the different apps together to create an actionable dashboard
Wire-framing and Proof of Concept
The proposal I created had 2 primary concepts dependent on long-term and short-term goals and prioritization of the company and the product team. Concept 1 was a revamp of the IA that allowed us to focus the core on the tasks to increase the overall productivity and quality of life for our users. This short term solution was not meant as the end goal, but a way for us to begin stepping our users into getting comfortable with this change. The next step was a full integration within each of the apps and allowing us to fully utilize the dashboard to streamline the users day to day. Concept 2 is a full prototype of a future state to work towards, this encompassed all the principles we identified from the design thinking session as well as from user feedback.
The following screens is a prototype created with the above user-flow in mind to convey this future state concept to Senior Leadership within both Engineering and Technology. The goal of this prototype was to provide insight into what a streamlined workflow could look like in a fully realized application suite aimed to address the critical user issues lowering our productivity.
A dashboard view that focuses on the tasks a user would need to accomplish rather than a highlight of the apps in the suite the user would need to use.
A view of adding two tasks from this dashboard to the user’s “task list” accessed anywhere from the top navigation bar.
When the user accesses their tasks, they are able to jump immediately to said task embedded within the application. This functionality was not available nor known about until we spoke to the users and identified it as an immediate and high priority need.
After the task has been completed, the user can jump into the next task, but also the system will keep record of the tasks completed and allow the user to use that tracking to generate a report for their review.
This alert allows the user to jump into that task as they would with the current system (email), except it goes directly to where they need to be instead of just opening the application.
The user is then able to complete the task they returned to in Application 2.
When the user dives into a task, it brings them to the part of the application where that needs to be completed (in this instance “Click Me”).
In this scenario, the user is in the middle of their next task when they are given a high priority alert for a task on a critical engine part.
Once the user completes the critical task, they’re able to continue the task they were last on.
Conclusion
The main goal of this prototype was to do more than just redesign the application suite, the design team looked to change the way users use the app to more closely match the job functions they already do. This required us to change the way we and our stakeholders thought about this suite. Ultimately after this prototype, testing and series of presentations I gave to the Senior Leadership at GE, this was identified as the best course of action and molded the future of this application suite.