Just wondering if anybody else is encountering the same passionate, heavy resistance to high performance HMI and responsive designs I am, and if so, how you convince customers to let go of the old, outdated paradigms?
For example, one of my biggest design pet peeves is the inconsistency of what red means. In my opinion, red means wrong, and red only means wrong. It does not mean stopped, idle, or off. But a lot of my customers will absolutely insist that we follow that color scheme. They want ignition’s new features, or pricing, but they want exactly what they have now.
The number one reason given for this is “this is what the operators are used to.” “Our operators would hate it.” “Our operators would be confused.” Personally, I kind of doubt this. Lines like this usually come from plant engineers who don’t actually operate the equipment on a daily basis. Operators use mobile devices and new apps every day. They don’t require training to use Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat. Yet, the idea of building a user interface for their equipment that is equally as intuitive seems like it’s not possible. Additionally, very few plants keep the same operators for long periods of time. So when someone tells me “this is what the operators are used to,” what I hear is “we spend weeks training our operators to this every time they get hired in, so we don’t want to spend another several weeks training them to use something else.” It’s so hard to convince them that the entire reason for high performance graphics and intuitive design is so you don’t have to spend as much time training new operators to use the equipment, or at the very least, you spend a lot less time on the interface portion of it.
Have you run into this resistance and have been able to overcome it? Or do you just give them what they want and move along? I just…hate the idea of slapping my name on an ugly, unintuitive interface, but at the end of the day, it’s also their money.
We have had resistance to it, its always from the legacy staff that complain about everything.
Our response is always based around the fact that the people paying for the project and the people signing off on the design are aware of risk and standards. If you and your design are backed by the management team of the legacy staff that are complaining, you can send them to their own managers to complain.
The pitch is always to the management group, and it is always around the alarm fatigue and complacency risk management. Once they are on board, the staff can get on board or get replaced.
I always find the staff that are whinging about high performance designs are the same staff that complain about OHS policy (OSHA for the foreigners), KPIs and OEE implementations.
There is always a human element to these upgrades, and bedside manner is important for the team doing the upgrades, so regardless of my black and white stance on the issue, I have to tread the diplomacy line very carefully to make the staff more likely to cross over to the dark side.
Great thoughts. I find myself often working directly with the “legacy staff” and any management we deal with will just refer to them on the matter. I think a lot of the issue is the difference between small and large companies. With a large company, you have a management group that is detached a bit from the actual process, for better or worse, and focuses its concern with “bigger picture” issues like OEE, KPI, etc. But when you’re dealing with a smaller company, which is what we deal with a lot, legacy staff has a lot more power, and often legacy staff and the management group are either one in the same, or the management group is hands-off and doesn’t care. I’ve never been in a planning meeting with management where legacy staff wasn’t sitting in with the age-old “our operators are gonna hate this” quips.
Yeah, this is the most annoying. Some customers are not fussed, open-minded, and easy to convince. And some like to micromanage every colour and stroke width— I would guess you can deal with them with soft skills or some sort of social-engineering-dark-psychology. I don’t have these skills. In their heads, it was fine before, why change?
I am finishing up a full implementation of high performance in a new green field. A dozen applications all developed following high performance. No red, green anywhere, except for critical alerts. Sparklines for levels, active trends on process data, Level 1 to 4 navigation heirarchies. This plant had alot of visitors from other plants to assist during commissioning and were all used to the old paradigms. Initially I would hear “I hate it, where are all the colors and rotating widgets and colored pipelines showing flow”. But, after using it for a week, most began to embrace it and appreciated the amount of information concisely displayed and the instant access to trending information pertinent to process control and evaluation. It helped that one of the lead engineers is severely color blind and can not distinguish red, green, blue or yellows.
I point out that they will eventually have a color-blind employee, and have to do a crash project to convert their old graphics. At least here in the USA.
Get a chance to talk with the OPERATORS. You know, those folks who will actually use it.
If there’s more than 10 men in that group, likely 1 of them is colorblind (that’s the average - 10% of male population is colorblind).
Help them understand the key concepts of WHY HP makes their lives easier. Especially for their new hires that have a hard time picking up the old “what does red mean in this case?” design. Grey is Good is pretty darn easy to learn.