Summary
Dave, leading a 50-person UX team at GE Software, recounts the development of a design system aimed at solving the massive scale and decentralized nature of GE’s software efforts. Starting in 2011 with only a few UX designers amidst thousands of developers, Dave and his team collaborated with Frog Design to create a modular, Lego-like kit of UI components that prioritized ease of use over strict design rules. Inspired by design systems from NASA, Apple, and Braun, they built a visual language and reusable components to accelerate development and enable teams without extensive UX resources to produce usable, consistent interfaces. Despite some initial challenges like lack of clear usage guidelines, multiple competing UI patterns, and engineering complexities, the system gained wide adoption within GE, eventually spawning variants such as a communications and healthcare design system. The team also focused on prototyping tools, co-creation workshops, and integrating design deeply with product teams under emerging lean startup culture promoted by leaders like Beth Comstock. Dave highlights lessons learned including the importance of continuous evolution, community contribution, and balancing creative craft with organizational scale. The talk closes with reflections on craft as active collaboration and prototyping, rather than pixel perfection, centered on solving complex industrial data visualization and user needs.
Key Insights
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GE’s software efforts in 2010 surprisingly ranked it as the 15th largest software company, yet UX design resources were extremely limited.
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The initial UX team at GE was too small to directly influence all 40,000 developers, pushing the need for a scalable solution.
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The design system concept was inspired by industrial design legacies like Braun, NASA, and Apple's human interface guidelines.
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The team adopted a tools-not-rules mantra to create a modular 'Lego' kit of UI parts aimed at broad developer adoption.
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Successful adoption was boosted by providing code-first deliverables, along with stencils for designers and PMs for fast prototyping.
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Multiple UI patterns for the same controls caused confusion and difficulty in maintenance, motivating a system redesign.
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The design system catalyzed a cultural shift at GE Software towards integrated, cross-functional teams with embedded UX.
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Variants of the design system were created for different GE domains, such as healthcare and communications, preserving core modularity but catering to unique needs.
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Challenges included balancing opinionated interaction patterns versus flexibility, and technical difficulties extending frameworks built on large CSS libraries like Bootstrap.
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Craft evolved from pixel-level perfection to co-creation workshops, storyboarding with simple tools, and rapid prototyping to align complex industrial IoT users and stakeholders.
Notable Quotes
"GE was something like the world’s 15th biggest software company, which was a huge surprise to everyone."
"We landed on this mantra of tools, not rules."
"If we made something that was really easy for developers to use, we would drive adoption."
"We didn’t know enough to have a strong opinion about what was good design and what wasn’t good design for these particular users."
"We found that multiple kinds of tabs confused users and complicated maintenance; at most, we need one kind of tab."
"We built a modular, adaptable space solely for co-creation and bringing in customers and stakeholders."
"Part of craft now is how we conduct co-creation workshops to form shared understanding and vision."
"Some of the best investments were making stencils for designers and product managers to quickly mock up ideas."
"People went from whiteboard to high fidelity prototype very quickly, which was both cool and a bit scary."
"We’re learning how to pay our designerly affection to the design system so we can prototype new ideas and have great conversations."
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