Guidelines for designing human-friendly user interfaces for factory floor manufacturing operators

Abstract

Agility and fast reaction to changes is required in today’s turbulent manufacturing environment. Unfortunately, the commonly used user interfaces (UIs) on the factory floor don’t support such rapid reaction. Even though the human involvement improves agility and reactivity of production systems, it is also a source of uncertainty, especially when it comes to information inputting. Therefore, specific attention should be placed on human-friendly UI design, in order to improve the reliability of collected data and productivity of operations, as well as to make the workplaces more attractive for the future operators. This paper gives generic guidelines for human-friendly UI design and represents a case study in the context of manufacturing IT-system design.