Industrial Software—What It Should Look Like

What if iPhone X were sent folded in ugly ruined boxes? Would customer satisfaction and loyalty be the same? Whoever says, “You can’t judge a book by its cover” is usually wrong (or at least not completely correct).

演示与内容同样重要。任何主要公司都遵循趋势，为自己展示最佳图像，以使该形象与客户期望保持一致。Web designers keep their websites up to date with the latest user experience trends, graphical designers redraw companies’ logos to adapt them to new styles (have you noticed the Audi logo is now flat?), commercials continuously adapt their language to one of social media. A company that can’t be found on Facebook or on Google Maps looks like an old-fashioned company and is less attractive to young people.

The same is true for industrial software interfaces. When a company develops industrial software, the interface not only determines how the user will interact with the system, but also reflects on the image of the system integrator.

When you think of industrial software for supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems or human-machine interfaces (HMIs), for example, you usually think about tanks and pipes drawn in gray, green and red engines and valves, a lot of analog values shown in a single page, and 3D buttons and switches. Though this is the way that industrial software has evolved from the first applications, this kind of user interface is no longer very appealing to users. Worse, it’s boring and not intuitive for the new young users.

Today, everyone has a smartphone, sometimes even two. People are used to tablets, smartwatches and touch interfaces that can be operated using complex, but intuitive, gestures. You have been able to order a Big Mac using a touchscreen for years—why can’t you start a production order or batch in the same way?

为什么用户不能够使用智能手机，智能手表或平板电脑或PC上的现代界面来操作机器？我们距离商店地板上的虚拟现实和增强现实并不是很远。在某些植物中，这些类型的解决方案已经与老式的SCADA并肩作用。系统集成商必须将其产品适应用户的期望，同时也使客户迈向新趋势，教给他们新的哲学并为接下来的事情做准备。

When developing an application, they way it looks should be your first thought as much as its functionalities and its stability. Many developers can write good code, but how many system integrators have a graphical designer on staff to draw interfaces and provide guidelines? The gap from a bad-looking application and a good-looking one can be very small, but can make a big difference in customers’ experience and satisfaction.

有时它不是一个做大事,but only of paying attention to small, inexpensive details. Let’s think about our smartphones again: I wouldn’t appreciate if app icons were of varying sizes, weren’t aligned in a grid or had different resolution images. This happens in many industrial applications I’ve seen installed in plants. Why wouldn’t customers care about that or feel a sense of frustration using it?

If you want to start restyling your apps, consider first that the most updated interfaces you can find are on websites or smartphone apps. Studying them is typically a good starting point when you start to develop a new industrial app. It’s not because you need to follow fancy trends, but because trends in websites and apps often determine pretty quickly user expectation. For example, consider where menus and navigation bars are placed and how they are structured because that will be the first thing a user will interact with in any application.

Try to think what you might do if you had to design your application for a website or mobile device. You might not have all the right tools to develop a web-like application, but you can try to make it look similar, nonetheless. Take into consideration the color schemas. Just replacing the standard SCADA gray with a light color like white today makes an application more modern. The same is true if you replace 3D buttons with bi-dimensional plain buttons and if you hide all non-critical analog values and show them only when a user needs or requests them. All these are just some hints that are valid today. Graphic style is continuously changing and adapting, so the style of industrial applications needs to as well.

练习和体验变化风格的影响的一个很好的练习是采用现有的，看起来古老的工业应用程序，并试图将其视为网络应用程序。重新考虑您期望在哪里找到每个功能，期望如何通过它导航，如何显示数据和信息，等等。

不要害怕 - 这种改变的方法对用户的痛苦可能不如开发人员痛苦。用户已经习惯与这种接口进行交互。如果您为他们提供类似的图形环境，您将简化他们对新系统的培训，维护和适应性，而且重要的是，您可能会与许多竞争对手区分开来。

The industrial environment is usually slower to adopt new trends. But the need to adapt tools to modern expectations is pretty urgent. If you can convince customers that the logic behind your system is the same even when the graphic is updated, they will have a very short payback in terms of user satisfaction and quality.

Elisa Costa是一名软件工程师Autoware，经认证Control System Integrators Association（CSIA）位于意大利维森扎的成员。Luigi de Bernardini是Autoware的首席执行官，也是Autoware Digital的总裁。有关自动保健的更多信息，请访问其轮廓on the Industrial Automation Exchange.