GE NCO Project Case Study

Project
At GE Aviation Digital, I worked on a NextGen Crew Operations project designed to help an airline’s operations center optimize crew resources during disruptions. The product needed to support complex decision-making around crew availability, operational efficiency, airline KPIs, and legal requirements tied to scheduling, duty limits, and crew welfare. The challenge was made harder by limited initial requirements and a problem space that was both operationally dense and highly sensitive to real-world constraints.

Ownership
I led the design effort for the project, guiding a global cross-functional team of designers and developers through discovery, workflow definition, testing, and refinement. My role included translating ambiguity into structure, shaping the UX strategy, identifying what users actually needed in high-pressure operational scenarios, and setting the direction for how the product should balance clarity with complexity. I also led research and discovery sessions with multiple airlines across the globe, using those conversations to uncover customer needs, validate assumptions, and influence the design and testing strategy.

Deliverables
My work included operational workflow mapping, UX strategy, wireframes, interface concepts, and tested experience designs for crew optimization scenarios. I helped define how critical information should be prioritized, what data operators needed to see to make informed decisions, and where the experience needed more or less detail depending on task and context. I also delivered research-driven design recommendations, facilitated usability feedback loops with airline stakeholders, and created a foundation the team could use to keep iterating toward a viable operational tool.

Outcomes
The project gave the team a clearer product direction in an environment that initially lacked definition. Research with airline partners revealed key gaps in assumptions and led to breakthroughs in how information should be organized and surfaced for operations teams. By identifying where users needed more visibility, where they needed less noise, and how they made tradeoff decisions under pressure, I helped shape a more actionable and realistic design strategy. The result was a stronger alignment between user needs, operational goals, and product direction, along with a more grounded path forward for testing and refinement.