HMI Lifecycle Support And Standards

Think you know UCDS?

Human Machine Interface

Myth: UCDS only develops HMI Standards?

It’s true we develop standards, but we offer far more than that to support the entire HMI lifecycle per ANSI/ISA-101.01.

There are many triggers for updating your HMI, including PCS migrations as well as control room updates.

HMI design is not just about graphics, it must include considerations for other human factor constraints such as physical console design, data integration, control room layout, alarm management etc.

Whatever the driver for change it is important to understand where you are today, and we provide services to gap assess your current HMI against best practices to help you prioritize expending your valuable resources.

As with all our services we offer foundational training customized for both the client, process and platform.

HMI standards are fundamental to high performance HMI design and drives best practices and consistency into all your HMI projects, whether you perform the engineering in house of use third party integrators. We work with you to customize our standard compliant Philosophy and Style Guide in a collaborative workshop environment to ensure buy in that can help the sometimes-difficult culture change when adopting new graphic representation. The goal is not to impose change, but to bring people along with education and collaboration, for example not using green/red state coding.

Once the foundations have been laid you are ready to start the design process. Now comes your biggest decision – do I just convert what I have today, or do I take advantage of the project to improve? Doing the latter may not entail any additional cost, playing additional design costs against lower engineering costs associated with optimized numbers of graphics and an optimized object library. This is where we can be of most help analyzing existing graphics, identifying which graphics should be deleted, combined or data abstracted to level 1 or 2 graphics in an optimized informational hierarchy. We still find that there is mystique and consistent poor design of level 2, and especially level 1 graphics. We leverage our experience and knowledge to work with you to develop these higher levels to be a real tool for your operations.