Instrument Control Blog Posts

This year Catalyst has seen a significant shift in areas of practice and the kinds of applications and interfaces we are engaged to develop. Part of this reflects changes in our own areas of interest, in particular, our work to support and develop sustainability initiatives. But I believe the shifts area reflective a larger move in the industry itself.

Compared to the last several years we have seen dramatic growth in the demand for application design services in sustainability and health care. There has also been continued growth in specific delivery styles of applications, such as SaaS and RIAs.  Desktop apps growth is relatively stable and flat, except in the area of health care, where this is an uptick in growth.  None of this is too surprising.

More interesting has been a rapid surge in interest for mobile application and gesture based interface design, as well as an increase in the requests for instrument control interfaces (perhaps reflecting the growth in embedded processors and remote monitoring).

For my own conceptual understanding of these trends I created color-coded matrix that shows the high growth areas relative to the lower growth areas.  It presents a heatmap-style view of application design trends with red representing hot areas and blue representing cool areas.

Many of our recent engagements have been around designing instrument control for mission critical applications. These interfaces enable workers to interact with equipment via an interface rather than mechanical gauges, switches and levers.

For example, for a biotech firm we designed and validated the user interface that controls diagnostic systems for analyzing tissue sample pathologies and drug discovery. For an energy optimization and management company we designed the user interface for instrumentation that controls and monitors real-time fuel inventories and environmental compliance. For a security system we designed the user interface that controls security cameras and alarm controls.

The user interface for these kind of instrument control is the link between the operator and decisions that affect critical infrastructure or even life and death medical situations.

So what are some of the challenges when designing these kinds of interfaces?

• Displaying data is not the same thing as displaying information
  Just because you think the interface shows it, doesn't mean operators see it, understand it, know how it correlates with their behavior, or feel motivated to take action.
• It isn't always obvious what to measure
  Determining what exactly are the critical pieces of feedback and environmental cues that operators really on can be challenging. You need to translate the operators "intuitive" understanding of the real world process and cues into an abstracted software interface. Since operators adjust systems according to the information they receive, if you're measuring the wrong thing, their decisions may have less impact or even the wrong impact.
• How do you optimally communicate the information
  Which type of displays are more effective for conveying information for particular tasks? Words, flashing lights, animations, charts and graphs, images, auditory cues, etc.? Different information requires different presentation modes and can engender measurable difference in reaction times.
• What are the most effective ways for the user to interact with the information
  Touch interface, gestural input, mouse, keypad, speech recognition? Which is going to be appropriate so the user interacts more with the task and less with the equipment?
• What are the social and collaborative possibilities
  How can the interface be designed so that it is easy to get outside feedback or collaboration. Can comparison data quickly be pulled for "expert" validation?
• How do you make the interface more engaging than the real world
  Instrument Control Interfaces are primarily about increasing productivity. But to achieve a real productivity gain, operators must use the new interface preferentially over existing systems. A poorly designed and validated interface could very easily be viewed as "Yet another damn display". So it is essential to make the display natural, workflow-useful, and engaging. Otherwise operators will find workarounds and the interface will be of much less value.
• How do you make the interface responsive
  If an instrument control interface is perceived as slow to respond, it will not be optimally used. Actions must be cancel-able, screens should load incrementally, the number of actions to complete a task should be streamlined, etc.

The above just scratch the surface of the challenges that are unique to instrument control user interfaces and application design. Biotech, manufacturing, and energy production/management are the areas where we are seeing the greatest growth in the demand for instrument control interfaces. We design these interfaces using modular, reusable UI, so that they can be re-purposed to other equipment or enhanced without code rewrites. As more and more devices gain embedded processors, the market for interface control will continue to expand at a rapid pace.