rOS (Rail Operating System) was GE Transportation's next-gen vision of how the rail industry would be connected across their platform of digital products. This system would integrate new and existing digital solutions to provide real-time logistics and predictive analytics to railroad companies worldwide.
My primary role for this project was to apply design thinking to the existing product strategy and to lead research of the product landscape. This would allow our team to identify and prioritize user personas and subsequently construct and implement new design standards across GE Transportation's products, with an end goal of creating a holistic, fully integrated suite of digital solutions.
To kick off our research, we performed stakeholder and user interviews to get more context around the problem. We reached out to internal stakeholders and to our external users in the field to begin learning about their frustrations and pain points.
Next, we sought out the respective product owners and utilized their collective knowledge to piece together a comprehensive map of the entire product ecosystem. Several weeks were spent tracking down folks who could answer our high-level questions about each product:
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What is the product and what problem does it aim to solve?
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To which business segment does the product belong?
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What framework(s) does the product utilize?
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Does the product integrate with any others?
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Are there defined user personas for the product? If so, who are they?
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Is internal access to the product possible?
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Are there existing screenshots of the product?
After compiling the data gathered from this bit of research, we were able to construct a high-level ecosystem view of the entire product landscape. This view was then organized by business segment and by product similarity in order to demonstrate where overlaps were most prevalent.
Then, we scoured our product ecosystem and performed a design pattern audit. Soon after we began, we discovered that there were two main themes of patterns emerging from the audit: those designs which were common to all products, and those which were sporadic and less common. Based on this finding, our approach changed and we decided it was best to work through the audit in phases. The first would encompass the most common design patterns across all products, and each subsequent phase would focus on the next theme of common elements:
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Phase 1: Iconography and Map Abstraction
We chose to focus on icons and geographic design first and separately from all other design elements due to the fact that they were the two most common design frameworks across all of the digital products, and the two core frameworks upon which we could execute subsequent design phases.
Our approach was to audit the span of products for these elements, then proceed into ideation and design. Once a design standard had been constructed and accepted by users, we would then resume the next phase of the audit.
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Phase 2: Navigation, Timelines, and Alerts
This phase is currently focused on elements that typically require user interaction.
GE Transportation's digital solutions portfolio had become burdensome and costly for its users and customers and, as a result, was suffering revenue loss due to customers abandoning existing solutions. Since the company's products were designed and built in a vertical structure comprised of segmented business units (silos), there were communication and design barriers which prevented product teams from building commonly branded solutions which each solved a specific user or customer need. The problem stemmed from three main factors:
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Excessive Product Overlap
The company had a sprawling digital product offering which, by itself, was not necessarily a problem. However, features and functions spilled over from one product to several, blurring the lines of product differentiation and causing confusion and frustration among users. With a product portfolio of 40+ solutions, this became very costly not only for the user and customer, but also for GE Transportation.
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Unconventional Design Framework
Existing solutions were built on multiple frameworks, from the back-end to the UI where there was a mass of unconventional design patterns for assets, frivolous information architecture, and lack of common interaction design.
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Limited Product Integration
Solutions were built as stand-alone products with little to no integration capability. Users were unable to effectively solve problems or perform daily tasks without having to bounce from application to application. This resulted in time and money lost by the customer, which then translated to lost revenue by the business.
The next step in our process was to observe users in the field as they interact with the products. We conducted numerous site visits to different railroad customers across the world and watched closely as users worked through their daily tasks. We gathered pages of quantifiable data:
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Numbers of clicks
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Numbers of application swaps
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Total task times
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Incompletions
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Abandons
This step in the process is where we truly began to learn about the disconnect between products and how important it seemed to customers and users to have a more integrated solution.
To validate our designs, we conducted design reviews and usability tests with our internal stakeholders as well as our users in the field. We provided surveys as a means of quantifying feedback from users in terms of how effective our designs were in solving the challenges and pain points identified early in the process. The feedback we received was highly positive, with candid suggestions on how to better solve the problem (most suggestions were around effectively differentiating types of assets and types of cargo).
The approach was to quickly circle back to phase 2 of the design audit in order to fulfill the next round of pattern designs. The team was also constructing an interactive design studio with style guides and code snippets for developers to use during future product development and is scheduled to be completed by early 2018. The first iteration of the interactive design studio website had been internally tested and accepted by the product teams, developers, and even the CTO of Digital Solutions.
Once the designs were complete, the next step for rOS would be working with product teams and engineers to begin the integration of the different solutions to form one intuitive digital suite - all connected to the "internet of things" and built on GE's Predix platform.
Next, we hosted problem-space and co-creation workshops to engage users and stakeholders so that we could begin to define user goals, pain points, needs, motivations, and users' thoughts on solutions and design.
We pulled in experts from the business and the field, then spent multiple days collecting their input to steer and define the critical elements needed to begin ideating towards a solution.
Once we digitized and synthesized our results from the problem-space workshops, we began throwing ideas around. We deliberated over the course of several days before having our first round of solution concepts. We worked in agile sprint cycles to quickly iterate and get feedback from internal stakeholders and users.
Based on our findings to this point, we decided to ideate across two high-level themes. The first was for the holistic, integrated solutions that users seemed to need. The second was around the common design pattern element. Also facing resource and time constraints, we decided to work internally on the integration piece and to partner with TopCoder to do a round of crowdsourcing for early design inspiration. Once we determined a winning design inspiration, we could move quickly and generate patterns.
The first prototype of the new design patterns was built internally from the synthesis of the first audit phase. It included iconography for locomotives, containers, and other railroad assets... as well as track and mapping - all with multiple zoom levels.
The second set of prototypes were built from the top results from our crowdsourcing efforts with TopCoder. They were more focused on user interaction - screens, dashboards, data visualizations.
The final prototyping stage was to bring the two different design landscapes together into one solution, combining the granular iconography and holistic dashboard concepts.
