Control room applications

Research

Our research plan included the following activities:

• Workshops with Carmeuse stakeholders to gather requirements
• Field observations and on-site interviews in three sites: We visited sites in Belgium and Slovakia to understand the operation, observe the way of working, and talk to operators and process engineers.
• Expert review of current interfaces: We got to run simulations with the current applications and identify improvements from a usability point of view.
• Study of standards for control room HMI design: Control room applications follow specific visual conventions, documented in ISA standards, with the latest being High Performance HMI (HP HMI). It is like a Design System existing only on paper.

We organised all the insights gathered with a reference to their source in an Airtable database, and organised them in the following themes:

• Information architecture
• Navigation
• Context
• Screen layout
• Interactivity
• Visual language.

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We used the same themes to define design requirements, thus creating a clear link between design requirements and research findings.

UX Design

In this project, UX covered navigation, physical and application screen layouts and design direction. I organised the work in design sprints, each sprint addressing some of the design requirements on these topics. Key moments of our sprints were design workshops during which we presented each other ideas and brainstormed on specific challenges.

The specificity of designing control room applications is that the entire room is the interface. Information organisation starts in the physical space. Drilling in the information hierarchy brings the user attention closer to a single screen.

Control room experience design entails:

• Understand which systems require monitoring in different operational phases / scenarios and at which level of granularity.
• Select a screen layout per operator that accommodates situation awareness and control needs.
• Draw operator post ‘wireframes’.
• Draw screen wireframes for different applications.

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UI design

UI design was very much component-driven. We already started sketching some HP HMI components during the research phase, but during UI design, there was a dedicated designer working on the UI libraries while I and 2 colleagues worked on screen mock-ups. I was also responsible for the design backlog and QA for the entire team. Specifically for components, I often did a first draft sketch and documented component states and variations.

Components