This talk is from WIRED by Design, a two-day live magazine event that celebrated all forms of creative problem solving.
Greg Petroff isn't afraid to say it: He's in charge of design at a huge company that's never really understood design all that well.
Petroff is the head of user experience at GE. At WIRED by Design (which GE sponsored), he talked about the challenge of building software tools for people who keep the industrial world running---the field engineers who service wind turbines, jet engines, oil rigs and the like. "They're not normally software people," he says. "They're people who hold tools." The applications they do have are often relics from the DOS era.
But with all the data pumping through these machines, Petroff thinks we could make it dramatically easier for these engineers to do their jobs. To prove this out, his group built a tablet application that puts everything a field engineer would need to do their job in a simple, work glove-friendly interface. The app arranges the various parts of a given service visit into a playlist, just like you'd have in iTunes. It's proof that the enterprise world can benefit hugely from the same user-focused design that's revolutionized consumer software in the last decade.
For more, see live.wired.com.
