How might we
Modernize the last-mile railroads' Rail Transportation Management System?
WABTEC CORPORATION. 2020
Samuel Rendón (Sr. UX Researcher, UX Lead), Puxi Yang, Lavanya Jagadesan, Nichole Peterson.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Bringing UX to a tech fearing industry.
Class II and Class III Railroads across Nort America run their operations using Wabtec (GE Transportation legacy products) software.
The first version of RailConnect runs using a 30 years old technology which is used by 95% of the customers, and the latest attempt of modernizing was done around 15 years ago. There is a steep learning curve of one year and a half before any user on the railroad industry can perform operations using the transportation management system, and most current users are about to retire.
STRATEGY DEFINITION
Reducing the learning curve to bring new blood.
The UX team was built to support the modernization efforts and incorporate human factors to the products developed by GE Transportation. The team identified the are of improvement to be on exception management, implementing alerts and automation, helping the user to transition away from merely operational tasks.
I act as the user experience lead for the RailConnect modernization effort, working with an interdisciplinary team of around 40 members including subject matter experts, data, backend, frontend, and UI engineers.
WORK EXECUTION
Seamless transitions across the product portfolio.
My role within the organization is to plan, execute, and lead discovery sessions with both internal and external stakeholders to identify pain points, opportunity areas, and understand major workflows to be restructured. These discovery sessions include co-creation workshops facilitation to increase empathy and agreement between parties involved.
A key role is to advocate for human-centric design principles while championing the importance of the UX process for the company and the industry as a whole, leveraging the new design system to reduce implementation costs and helping the users to transition to a user-friendly interface.
