GE Smart Catalogue

Case Studies

Company

GE, Industrial Solutions EMEA

My Role

UX Designer / Project Lead

UX Evangelist

Background

GE Industrial Solutions is the industrial products and solutions division of General Electric, one of the world’s largest conglomerates. It is is a global leader in power distribution solutions and appliances, offering a wide range of innovative products aimed at increasing energy efficiency and reducing environmental impact.

Project mission

The org needed to revamp its desktop-based catalog app to serve to customers across the continents in Europe, Middle East, and North Africa.

The project needed a complete new content management system (CMS) built along with a responsive to desktop & tablet views, and work in offline/online modes.

Challenges

A strong engineering & manufacturing culture with minimal experience in software development. This meant a linear water-fall structure & protocol for projects which is unfit for software development projects
Team of 1 in design
It required both the front-end development and a complete new back-end system
Corporate infrastructure limited choices of platforms to build products on especially eCommerce
Limited budget for the scope of work required

Solution / action

I focused on UX & interaction design while networking with other GE leaders to source design style-guides from other GE orgs
Sourced & partnered with an agency for development. It also provided some support for UI production
Workshops held with the agency to map out the planning & specifications doc
Worked within the GE paradigm of waterfall process to appease protocol while working agile where possible

Achievements

Introduced ‘design thinking’ to the Project Management team in EMEA
Demonstrated & taught colleagues how to approach software development leadership – working in Lo-fi & Med-fi to design experiences
Interviewed internal experts and researched into User personas for the project
Managed UX design & project management in Barcelona while the production team & development team were located in different continents & time-zones (North America & Asia)
Introduced GE’s Design system to business & PM teams in EMEA. To re-use existing components for brand & UI consistency
Completed the design to a MDP (Minimum Desirable Product) for both front-end & back-end production
Managed the usability testing sessions to validate

Revamp of catalogue: product portfolio

GE industrial Solutions org sells electrical components specialised in industrial construction & manufacturing, a B2B model. The product inventory are in thousands of models and products with much of the content being technical specifications for them.

The legacy system was limited to a desktop application running only on Windows OS. In order to expand out to the variety of devices the solution needed to be:

Location aware for language applied
OS aware to detect & be serving to Mac/OS/Windows/Android devices with responsive capabilities
Work in online/offline mode
Dynamic content needed to be served from a CMS (Content Management System) which is integrated to SAP’s ERP system
Enable customisation features to improve the UX similar to a B2C experience

engineering culture & manufacturing business

As is it the case for many B2B business cases, access to end-users is much more a challenge than B2C due to privacy concerns and business restrictions. To overcome this obstacle as a starting point, I’ve started with creating provisional User personas based on interviews with internal colleagues who were customer-facing.

Thereafter, with further desktop research on social media & further interviews, I was able to draft up a proto-persona to formulate the arch-type persona as the primary User persona.

It guided the design process in the early Lo-fi wire-flows to start designing the experiences based on their motivations & frustrations mapped out.

leveraging ge healthcare's legacy design system

Networking with senior GE managers overseas in led me to find a trail of a design Centre of Excellence which served GE Healthcare, a different division. They were able to guide me to the online DS (Design System) which was a legacy version but still efficient in providing us with fundamental UI building blocks in production. This helped shave time in adhering to brand consistency & development time. The slideshow below has details on how GE was one of the first enterprises globally to pioneer the use of a DS, before it went mainstream.

GE Spearheads Design System

The San Ramon Design Center opened and the Industrial Internet Design System (IIDS) launched, allowing GE to align design efforts across the organization.

2012-2014

2015

frog Design supported the build out of a new design system in Predix—which was inspired by IIDS—and leveraged a design collaboration approach to help GE co-collaborate with partners.