Lab Talk: Build HMIs yourself in no time

During his Lab Talk in our office, Matthias spoke about developing HELIO, a software for building HMIs, the interfaces on large industrial machines.

He took us on a journey through the creation of the product and through various challenges that he, the designers and the developers faced along the way. The goal that Matthias and the team have set themselves is pretty simple: they want to put the creation of machine interfaces (HMIs) in the hands of the product team.

Insights

Using examples from the HELIO team's many years of experience, Matthias explained the range of challenges involved in developing HMIs. His excursion on the topic of packaging production in the food industry was fascinating. Here, Matthias once again highlighted concisely why the programmers of machine control systems (PLC – Programmable Logic Controller) are not always the ideal designers for their HMIs.

The focus of the PLC programmers has always been on the controls/settings of the machine and far too little on the configuration of the product that the machine ultimately produces. As the person operating the machine, I want to be able to adjust, for example, the pack size, the materials or variants of closures and not how fast which part of the machine rotates or moves at which point. Even clever software like HELIO cannot deliver this rethinking out-of-the-box. This requires a process of mutual negotiation.

The example impressively demonstrates that in many areas of the manufacturing industry, design is still “for the machines themselves” and not for the users of the machines. HMIs must enable precise and reliable communication with the machine while still keeping the connection to the people who produce with it.

Thank you very much, Matthias, for your visit!

We thank you for your inspiring presentation and look forward to incorporating the ideas from this exchange into our projects.

About Matthias Wagler

Matthias Wagler is HELIO's product owner. His focus is on the combination of design, technology and usability. With his many years of experience developing interfaces and software, he always brings valuable perspectives and, above all, the right questions to designing future-proof technologies.