Chris Damsgard, a senior controls and information systems engineer at food maker General Mills Inc., in Golden Valley, Minn., tells a story about a usability study that the company recently conducted with employees on a particular software product.

"We were asking the user to change a setting. This UI (user interface) had about 30 different settings on it, and we followed the user's mouse around the screen as we recorded it. The user's mouse circled the entire screen, and the check box they needed to change was sitting right in the middle, and they never even saw it," Damsgard relates. "Something that may be very obvious to the developer, because they built it, may not be obvious to the end-user, especially when they've got 30 different options staring them in the face."

This anecdote illustrates  an issue that is gathering a growing amount of attention these days in the industrial controls and automation space. Many of today's industrial products, with their ever-growing feature sets, have become too complex and difficult to use, leading to increased training costs and lost time, and in some cases, even robbing manufacturing companies of the very benefits that the features were intended to produce. But more vendors are beginning to take notice. Increasingly, as a way to differentiate their products and help customers become more productive, automation suppliers are stepping up their efforts to reduce complexity in their products and make them easier to use.

One of the most visible is Emerson Process Management, Austin, Texas. The company launched its own Human Centered Design Institute last year, and is working to broadly integrate human-centered design (HCD) principles and methodologies throughout its product-design process. Other vendors, including ABB, Invensys Operations Management (IOM) and Rockwell Automation, among others, cite a growing internal focus on usability issues as well.

Usability has always been important, says Jerry Cook, a software manager at Rockwell Automation Inc.'s Control and Visualization Business, in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. "But I think the recognition of how important it is has become clearer to the automation world in the last few years," observes Cook, who heads up a user-experience design team that aims to improve usability of Rockwell's RSLogix 5000 product line.

Indeed, even manufacturers themselves are getting into the act. "We have projects going on in advanced visualization, and we've done work with some of our very largest customers," says Rob McGreevy, IOM vice president, platforms and applications. "And it's interesting to find that not only are we doing these sorts of user-centered design activities, but a lot of them are doing it as well."
 
A converging set of challenges is driving the trend. Changing workforce demographics is one. As more experienced users retire and workforces are streamlined, fewer workers with less in-depth knowledge are being asked today to do more, and they often don't have time to learn or be trained on highly complex product feature sets.

Add to that the fact that in many industries, process units and plants are becoming larger, while smarter instrumentation, sensors and other devices are all producing growing amounts of data. This calls for engineering, controls and maintenance tools that are more advanced, but also more complex. The result is that industrial end-users today may be faced with multiple product interfaces for an array of feature-laden products that often provide layer upon layer of functionality, requiring advanced knowledge for optimum results.

Ask grandma: Meanwhile, new generations of highly usable consumer products are also fueling changing user expectations. "With software, we can make these things simpler. The [Apple] iPhone is proof of that," declares Damsgard at General Mills. "My grandma can use an iPhone. But my plant engineer, who's possibly got a master's degree, struggles to figure out how to use a trending tool. That's a big problem."

Emerson Process Management's human-centered design initiative got its start about six years ago. At the time, research showed that despite many useful features being built into Emerson products, those features weren't being used as frequently as expected. In many cases, surveys revealed that the products were simply too difficult for time-strapped customers to figure out and use, says Duane Toavs, director of the company's Human Centered Design Institute. The company identified usability as a strategic imperative, and established a relationship with the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), in Pittsburgh, a recognized leader in the field of usability research.

As an outgrowth of its work with CMU, the company formed its Emerson Human Centered Design Institute, a ...