GE Voices Website

GE Voices is a web-based platform for GE employees, suppliers and other supporters to learn more about critical issues and polices affecting GE at the local, state and federal level and also to make their voices heard. It was launched with the goal of building grassroots advocacy and engaging the GE ecosystem on an important topical issue, and was often promoted during GE’s US manufacturing tours at a local level. With an increasing amount of attention on these tours, GE has came to us with a need to rethink and elevate the overall experience to better engage their audiences and meet GE’s communication and business goals.

Three Primary Goals

Before we start, we conducted interviews with stakeholders and relevant GE employees to better understand the increasing needs and higher expectations of GE's employees, suppliers and other supporters. We then set up three primary goals for the new, elevated GE Voices 2.0. based on our research.

Four Audience Groups

There are many audiences we need to address for GE Voices. We categorized the audiences into four main groups. Among these four groups, Suppliers and Employees are defined as "Power Users", as they are expected to be engage more with the service than the other groups.

The Profile of Power Users

We profiled our power users based our research among the group and listed the below characteristics:

What Does a Power User Want to See?

With the understanding of previous research and interview results, we brainstormed together and named some potential content buckets that the new GE Voices experience could cover. These became a starting point for the wireframes.

Wireframing

Based on the findings above, we created wireframes of the homepage and state pages and put together a mid fertility prototype to test out the content structure and functionalities.

Style Guide

GE Voices lives under GE’s main brand umbrella and their color palette and typography style would need to be used here. On top of that, we added a yellow as an accent color to balance out the blues. Button are design in rounded styles to match the rounded GE Insipira Sans typeface.

Homepage

Main feature of the homepage is the “GE Across America” module with US map containing general information about GE’s footprint through out the US. The color overlay on each state represents the range of GE’s employee number, circles with blue outline and transparent white fill represents the amount of GE’s suppliers, and the yellow diamond shape shows the locations of GE’s facilities. This map also functions as a link to the detailed information page of each state.

When hovering over the map, the user will be able to get the exact number of those data points of the specific state they are on: Numbers of employees, facilities and suppliers. The user can get to the specific state pages either by clicking the state on the map or choose from the dropdown menu above.

Modular Design for State Pages

Another essential part of the experience is the state profile pages on which the user will find relevant information about specific states. We designed a modular system which will allow content editors to build and customize these pages themselves through the CMS. The modules are designed based on all the possible content buckets. This system is unified yet flexible, and will produce pages that are engaging and visually balanced regardless the amount of content.

Responsive

This experience was built with responsiveness in mind, and we paid special attention to the stage page modules to make sure they perform well across all screen sizes.

Reflection

GE Voices is very unique in its content structure and audience base, and the design process definitely reflects that. It was challenging at first to design a system that works for 50 unique pages with different amount of content and is easy to use for the less tech-savvy audience, but we managed to do so by having a solid understanding of the content structure, user behavior and GE design language. The new GE Voices website was promoted during GE’s manufacturing tour to a large audience and helped achieve the goals of building grassroots advocacy and engaging the GE ecosystem on an important topical issue.

What I Did