Predix is a new software platform that will eventually bring all of GE's industrial machines onto one contextually-aware, cloud-connected system. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED The effort is being lead by designer Greg Petroff, who took the reins as the company's head of UX in 2011. Image: GE But the vision is to connect all these machines and more to the cloud, allowing for predictive service and wide-reaching benchmarking. Image: GE It's all in the name of efficiency--the aim is 1% per industry per year. Image: GE The card-based UI and focus on contextual smarts make comparisons to Google Now a no-brainer. Image: GE

A few years back, after an internal audit of their vast and various business holdings, the folks at General Electric made something of a discovery: Their company was roughly the fourteenth biggest software maker in the world. They'd never really thought of themselves as a software company–all that coding was being done by developers hidden in silos within other silos in the corporate structure–but they figured maybe it was time to start. So in June 2011, the company hired designer Greg Petroff and put him in charge of user experience for the whole shebang. His first project was an ambitious one: creating a system that will bring all of GE's industrial machines, from wind turbines to hospital hardware to jet engines, onto one cloud-connected, contextually-aware, super-efficient platform.

Since 2011, the company's Software Center, located in San Ramon, California, has grown from four people to some 700 and counting. In that time, Petroff's team there has built the foundation for Predix, a flexible software platform intended to dramatically streamline the monitoring and maintenance for all the industrial technologies GE provides. Whereas field engineers currently wrestle with idiosyncratic systems and separate interfaces for all the different hardware they service–sometimes armed with little more than a briefcase full of paper manuals–Predix and its card-based UI will gradually become the interface for all those machines.

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But the software's promise goes beyond cohesiveness and convenience. The real vision is to link all these diverse machines to the cloud, quantifying their performance and benchmarking them against each other–all in the name of eliminating the number one bugaboo of all these industries: unscheduled down time. Imagine an engineer walking up to a wind turbine with tablet in hand, and the turbine telling him that a fuse should be replaced not because it's broken but because it will give out in three weeks time. That's the future GE's really looking toward.

>A 1 percent efficiency gain can translate to $15 billion saved in jet fuel.

Keeping things running smoothly is obviously good for business. The aim for Predix is a 1 percent increase in performance, per industry. That might not seem like much, but when you're the sixth biggest company in the U.S., with properties in all sorts of massive, society-driving industries like power, water, transportation and energy management, a single percent can translate into a huge amount savings. Hitting that goal in aviation, Petroff says, could mean something in the ballpark of $15 billion saved in jet fuel and other costs over just a handful of years.

But while the Predix system will undoubtedly make life easier for GE's engineers and their many customers, it's also an interesting case study for designers. Why? Because instead of resorting to esoteric controls and device-specific applications, Predix embraces a few key design trends that we're already seeing shape the next generation of consumer user experiences on smartphones and tablets. In other words, the software GE's rolling out for its massive industrial hardware offers a glimpse of some things you'll be seeing more and more on your own devices in apps and updates to come. Here are some of the principles that guided Predix.

1. Context Is Everything

The overriding design principle for Predix was to embrace context. The idea for the platform goes far beyond giving engineers a touchscreen manual for repairs. It's really about creating a resource that knows exactly what needs to be done to optimize any machine at any moment. Eventually, Predix will make sure everything's on the same page, from the machine in question to the enterprise software in the cloud to the the device carried by the engineer. At that point, the software won't just tell an engineer what needs to be done to fix an MRI machine, it will tell her specifically what she needs to do to fix the MRI machine sitting in front of her.

>This is precisely the philosophy that's driving software like Google Now.

On the machine side, that involves a high level of situational awareness. All the hardware and software involved needs to be in perfect sync–Predix needs to know how long a particular turbine's been installed, how hard it's been running and in what environment, and all sorts of other variables. But what that contextual knowledge affords is the ability to give the humans involved a precise picture of what's wrong–or soon to be wrong–with those machines. When a field engineer arrives on site to service a machine, Petroff says, "all the right information, and only the right information, he needs to be successful is available to him." Predix isn't just a dumb storehouse of GE's machine knowledge–it's the ultimate assistant for working with the industrial internet.

If that sounds a little bit familiar, here's why: It's precisely the philosophy that's driving software like Google Now, the clever service that surfaces information before you even search for it. In the case of the GE engineer, Predix will zero in on necessary maintenance and service automatically. "I don't even need to know," Petroff says, assuming the role of field engineer. "I just show up, and the things I need to do just kind of miraculously and magically appear." That happens to be the express goal of Google Now, which aims to miraculously and magically surface reservations, driving directions, sports scores and other tidbits of data just by gleaning what you'll need in certain situations. Apple just bought the email-scraping app Cue for upwards of $40 million, ostensibly in an effort to stay competitive in the predictive, context-based game. The big idea is that we're reaching a point, in both consumer and enterprise software, where the task of figuring out what matters is being offloaded from people to computers.

2. Software as Media

Predix gets its industry-spanning flexibility by leveraging one of the most popular trends in UI design: cards. Instead of creating a suite of different, specialized apps, the Predix Reader, as the user-facing app is called, serves as a container for an extensive, dynamic library of "micro-apps," each dedicated to some aspect of monitoring or maintaining a piece of GE hardware. A field engineer sent out to fix a jet engine, for example, would tote a tablet preloaded with a collection of cards related to that call. One might show him the maintenance history of that particular unit; the next might show how that unit benchmarks against others elsewhere in the country; a third might delineate a check-list of common problems; a fourth might show a table of projections for how much various repairs could yield in savings down the line.

As we run up against the limitations of single-purpose mobile apps, the card-based UI is something we'll see more and more. "The notion behind it is to get rid of monolithic software and build bite-size software," Petroff says. In both Predix and Google Now, cards offer a way to bring disparate data streams into one unified interface. But with Predix, the philosophy goes beyond shrinking data down to bite-size. By adhering to a principle of treating software like media, Predix has some interesting implications for the way all those cards are consumed and created.

>Creating a workflow becomes like putting together a playlist.

On a basic level, treating software like media means letting users organize it to their own tastes. Different engineers might want to see different cards in different situations, and Predix will give them the chance to organize their own collections based on how they like to work. But Predix also looks forward to a point where cards could become interrelated components of more complex workflows. Google Now mainly uses cards to deliver discrete packets of data–instead of checking your ESPN app to see the score of the game and your calendar app for your next appointment, Now pulls them into the same stream. Predix looks beyond that, to a future where cards could be linked and co-dependent.

"We think of the card as sort of a song," Petroff says. "And a workflow is called a collection–they're really like the playlist you put together to go to the gym or to cook with." The same thinking applies to the creation side of the software; cards can be developed using a simple HTML 5 framework, a tool that effectively turns GE's formidable army of developers into ad-hoc designers. "This notion of software as media breaks software into these small, small chunks, and we believe that we can scale them really fast," Petroff says.

3. Right Device, Right Moment

With its focus on context and cards, Predix is right in step with the trends we're seeing on our own smartphones and tablets. But in other ways, GE's new software is ahead of the consumer curve. One big one is the idea that smart software needs to work across devices–not just in the sense that it shares data through the cloud but rather by offering a truly seamless user experience from screen to screen.

"We don't really talk about mobile anymore–we talk about 'right device, right place, right moment,'" Petroff says. Scaling the card paradigm to different screen sizes is something that's been part of the effort from the start. The cards Predix relies on can be accessed via desktops, and Petroff's team is already looking at ways to share them seamlessly between devices. Imagine, for example, an engineer being able to slide a card from his tablet up onto a power plant's wall-sized control center screen. Petroff's designers are also keeping an eye on nascent technologies, considering how cards might work in the context of devices like augmented reality glasses (things that might still be a ways from real-world adoption but have very real benefits in some industrial hardware scenarios).

In the realm of "right device, right moment," Google and Apple have plenty to learn. Just consider how stubbornly ignorant your smartphone, tablet, desktop and TV are of one another–and one another's content–when they're all in the same room, or even within arm's reach. We may be living in the post-desktop era, but that doesn't mean we've forsaken the things entirely, and next-generation software will be most effective if it accounts for the fact that we spend hours at a time sitting in front of PCs. Cloud-based document storage and web apps have offered some linkage in our own personal hardware ecosystems, but consumer gadgets still have a ways to go until they'll let us flick a picture effortlessly from our tablets to some other big screen. If GE has their way, the people at the power plants might get that type of functionality before we do.

Homepage image courtesy GE Aviation