on April 09, 2025 On a quest to work smarter (not harder) when it comes to HMI design so you can stay ahead of the curve? Shaving even a few seconds off a common step in your process can have a significant compound impact on the time you spend building HMI screens. To that end, here are 10 HMI design tips to speed up building in Ignition Perspective, offered by Inductive Automation Sales Engineer Reese Tyson. He originally shared these best practices in our webinar “ Design Like A Pro: 25+ Tips For Lightning-Fast Development .” Tip 1: View Tag Utilization With Active Subscriptions Tip 2: Get Instances Of Tag Usage With The Reference Log Tip 3: Speed Up Troubleshooting With The Help Of Diagnostics View Tip 4: Specify Tab Order Across Your UI Tip 5: Leverage Handy Keyboard Shortcuts “This one I use all the time, and if you aren't aware of it, it's going to save you a ton of time,” Tyson says. “.. In [Ignition] 8.1.26, we added an Alt + Shift + Click hotkey that allows you to drill all the way down to components at the lowest level.” This Deep Selection shortcut bypasses the need to double-click and then click into a container in order to access a component in Perspective. Tip 6: Double-Click On Labels & Buttons To Edit Text Tip 7: Specify Components to Automatically Grow/Shrink Tip 8: Copy/Paste Bindings If you have a lot of scripts specified on your binding, this tip is a valuable time-saver. Simply right-click on a property that has a binding specified, and click on “Copy Binding” in order to copy the binding. “That would include all of the binding, any sort of transform, any scripts, mapping, formats, etc.,” Tyson explains. You can then paste that binding elsewhere by right-clicking and selecting “Paste Binding.” Tip 9: Use Built-In Color Themes Take advantage of Ignition’s built-in color themes to save time during industrial interface design. “We've tried to put all the colors that you're ever going to need in an HMI/SCADA application, including things like quality of a tag or query or an error,” Tyson says. Tip 10: Send Data With system.perspective.sendMessage Start Building Your Best HMIs Ever If you want to lead the pack when it comes to designing HMI displays, see what’s possible with an unlimited free trial of Ignition HMI — the industry’s fastest tool for creating beautiful, cutting-edge HMIs. Tags / Inductive Automation All rights reserved