Introduction

In this article I share a UX-concept for HMIs in the engineering industry that I have developed during my time at Siemens.

(Due to NDAs I am not allowed to share the final HMI Design, so in this article I only explain the core concept.)

To make it understandable for a UX Designer without a background in the mechanical engineering industry I don’t cover industry-specific details.

The Situation

Factory lines in the engineering industry run mostly automated. Mechanical engineers monitor the factory lines and fix issues to guarantee smooth production.

A primal task includes recognizing problems at an early stage and rectifying them as quickly as possible in order to enable the production line to continue uninterrupted.

HMIs (Human Machine Interfaces) are used to operate the lines and to detect and correct errors/problems.

Industry standard HMIs

Different production lines use different numbers, sizes and types of HMIs. This leads to non standardised Hmi use because a lot of production lines get treated differently. This causes a lot of complexity.


Example of Different types of HMIs in use:

(An overview for a better understanding of the complexity when standardising a HMI Design for a factory)

Note: HMI software is due to hardware restrictions static not responsive