Movement Planner was GE Transportation's premier railroad network logistics solution but has since been acquired by another rail company, Wabtec. It provides railroad companies with an expanded real-time view of their tracks, trains, and signaling assets.
My primary role for this project was to co-lead research & observation in order to gather user input around the existing solution, and to facilitate co-creation and problem space workshops to draw out innovative and various design concepts.
During discovery, we performed internal contextual interviews to learn about how to appropriately frame the problem. We met with the product team to gather information on the product in its current state, seeking to understand how it was currently used by the customers.
We hosted problem-solving workshops with our customer stakeholders and users to begin identifying the vision of the product, as well as the long-term and short-term goals. We included a vision exercise to guide the entire session, and started to address risks to identify what potential issues we may hit during design that may keep us from achieving our goals. We worked to identify and prioritize personas and their respective pain points, then began to map out the dispatch and network management processes and touch points.
Railroad companies lack a proactive network viewer platform that can leverage the 'industrial internet of things' to provide real-time event information and predictive capabilities. GE Transportation offered Movement Planer as a network viewer solution that only provides reactive capability. In its current state, dispatchers and managers were not proactively alerted to potential network issues, which had a sprawling effect on railroad providers, cargo shippers, and end consumers.
Next, we observed users in the field as they interacted with the product in its current state. We watched as users interacted with the product and how they went about their daily task flow.
We captured on-site input from users with regard to frustrations or needs that were not being met, giving us valuable insight to begin our ideation.
We hosted co-creation workshops to engage users and stakeholders so that we could begin to capture stakeholder and and user thoughts on defining early concepts for solution design.
We used storyboards to help users and stakeholders remain aligned to the vision and goals for the product as they produced individual design ideas.
The first prototype iteration of Movement Planner was built from a combination of the synthesis from our research and workshops, the synthesis of the first rOS design audit phase, and the GE Predix IIoT analytics platform. The prototype was to be user test-ready by November 2017. The platform was acquired by Wabtec and has been live since 2018.
