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
Role: Product Designer
Duration: 2019 – 2021
Responsibilities: UI/UX design, visual design, user research, wireframing, mockups, interaction design, prototyping, front-end development, design system contributions, and project management.
As a Product Designer on the R&D team at GE Aviation, I designed and shaped multiple internal products, primarily focused on aviation management. My work involved crafting intuitive interfaces, improving workflows for aerospace professionals, and collaborating closely with engineers and stakeholders. While I can’t share specific details due to privacy restrictions, my contributions enhanced operational efficiency and user experience across critical aviation systems.
Below are some brief notes on my work during this time, highlighting publicly available information from one of the projects.
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 R&D team alongside researchers, a product manager, and three software engineers. Together, we set out to develop the Digital MRO web application for GE's Research Center.
The application
Digital MRO provides accurate forecasts for engine removals and predicts the level of component replacements required before an overhaul, optimizing maintenance planning and reducing downtime.
Design Focused
Our team’s goal was to create a web application that empowered the Wales Aviation Shop team in the UK with actionable insights to streamline operations and reduce costs.
My Role in the Project
I led key design and development efforts, including user flows, wireframes, low- and high-fidelity prototypes, visual design, and front-end development. The tech stack included Polymer, D3, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to build dynamic and data-driven interfaces.
Following the Design Thinking process (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test), I ensured a user-centered approach throughout development. I used Adobe XD for wireframes, mockups, and prototypes, Illustrator for GUI elements, and After Effects/Lottie to create animations that enhanced the user experience.
The project was built on the Predix Platform, GE Digital’s industrial IoT software platform, enabling edge-to-cloud data connectivity, real-time analytics, and scalable services to support industrial applications.
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 provided building blocks that enabled quick and efficient assembly of UI screens. Given the system’s need to address a wide range of use cases across different environments, it was crucial to create components adaptable to both regular and low-light settings.
As part of the development process, I also implemented the code for these interactions. Below are examples of the navigation bar and layout, demonstrating how the design system was applied and how the interactions were realized in code to ensure a seamless user experience across varying conditions.
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 were based in the UK, we maintained continuous communication to understand their pain points and needs. I also had the opportunity to travel twice to the Wales Aviation Shop, where I conducted on-site testing, gathered user feedback, and gained firsthand insights into the industry and MRO processes.
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.