Establishing a User-Centered Design Process for Human-Machine Interfaces: Threats to Success

Abstract

While user-centered design (UCD) processes have widely been established in domains like end-user electronics and business-to-consumer products, such processes still lack widespread adaptation for the development of industrial human-machine interfaces (HMIs). Over a period of more than two years, we have worked as part of a development team at a company from the manufacturing domain in a pilot project to introduce a UCD process. During this period, we have - via participant observation - collected a set of observed practices and behaviors that violate well-known UCD principles. Furthermore, we derived some root causes of these violations. Our insights are that introducing a UCD processes cannot be performed isolated for a single development team but impacts the entire organization including management and requires trust as well as changes with regard to mindset, methods, technologies, and team organization.