How to reduce the turnaround time of servicing jet engines, in one of the largest MRO facilities in the world? Proprietary Design Systems, Fleet management, platforms, forecasting, component customization, visualizations, and more!
Overview
My Role: Lead UX Designer
Duration: 2019 – 2022
I am a product designer on the R&D team, leading design on multiple internal products, primarily focused on aviation management. Unfortunately, due to privacy reasons, I can’t show the detail of my work at GE Aerospace, so for now, you’ll have to trust me on the cool stuff we make.
Responsibilities: User research, wireframing, mockup design, prototyping, UI design, front-end development, project management.
Here are some brief notes about the work I have done during this time on one of the projects, showcasing information that is publicly available.
Digital MRO ( maintenance, repair and overhaul )
Project Overview
With a fleet of ~36,000 jet engines, GE Aviation’s services portfolio represents one of the largest growth opportunities for the business. One of the keys to growing this portfolio is implementing new digital solutions to improve their capacity for servicing GE’s jet engines.
GE researchers are helping by integrating new in-situ inspection and materials technologies with fleet and shop operations to optimize Aviation’s maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) enterprise.
The Team
In early 2019 I joined the GEIQ R&D team, and we worked with a small team of a researcher, one product manager, and three software engineers—to help create the GRC Niskayuna (GE's Research Center) Digital MRO web application.
The application
The Digital MRO accurately forecasts when engines will need to be taken off the aircraft, and it also predicts during engine operation prior to removal the level of component replacement required at the overhaul.
Design Focused
The objective of our local team, was to help create a Web-app that would allow the Wales Aviation Shop team in the UK see insights, and take action to reduce costs.
What We Delivered
I led activities such as user flows, wireframes, low and high-fidelity prototypes, and visual design, as well as helped with front-end development using Polymer, D3, Javascript, CSS, & HTML.
For this proyect I followed the Design Thinking process (Empathyze, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test). The tools we used to design were Adobe XD for wireframes/mockups/prototypes, Illustrator to create GUI elements, and After Effects/Lottie to create animations.
The project was designed using the Predix Platform, which is an industrial IoT software platform from
Predix Design System
The Predix Design System provides a common visual and interactive environment for developing Predix-based apps.
It gives a consistent approach to using color, material, typography, page structure, navigation and motion, and comes with a set of tools including templates, design principles, usage guides and stencils.
Predix UI
The Predix UI is distributed as part of the Predix platform and can be used to build user interfaces for industrial Internet web applications.
Blazing Performance
The system is made up of three parts:
Plug-and-play Predix UI Components for UI/UX development
Composable and reusable CSS modules that establish consistent design
Extensive stencils and guidelines to guide your application design
Building Blocks
Using the Atomic Design methodology, the design system was used as building blocks to assemble the UI screens with ease and speed. Because the system needed to provide solutions for a vast array of use cases in different environments, it was important to provide components that could be viewed in both regular and low-light environments.
Customizing Web Components
The web components are its core elements and are modules that provide more elaborate capabilities like data visualizations, tables and calendars. They are a set of user interface building blocks based on the W3C web components standard that can be assembled together to build an application.
Alongside the ‘basic’ components for UI elements such as dropdown menus, data tables and tabs, there are a number of more specialized D3-based data visualization charting components designed specifically for industrial internet use cases, I was responsible for designing and customizing data visualization for the DMRO proyect.
Because our users are based in the UK, we continously communicate with them to understand their painpoints and needs. I also had the opportunity to travel twice to the Wales shop to test the application, and learn more about the industry and the MRO process.
Due to the proprietary nature of this application I am unable to share any visual designs, but I am happy to further discuss my process.