Navigation needs to be a Natural Act!!!!

Last week I visited some sites and engineering houses as they developed new systems. What struck me was the amount of time, and effort we put into designing a forced navigation between screens and windows. Even though, I knew this in my mind, I asked Why?.

In designing navigational buttons,  thereby enforcing a method of navigating through the application, which then now needs to trained to the people. Why cannot the system has Natural navigation built from the application model.

So what is this about?

Simple in today’s environment we have a couple of areas effecting the operational environment:

• Rotating people are in locations, role shorter times
• Increase in responsibility and decision making requirements, requiring a significant increase in data and information the operator must absorb or react over.

Last week I discussed Advanced Process Graphics, and how the new coloring scheme where only exception is shown is key to a person’s day, not the pretty pictures, providing a practical way to address the second point of more information. This starts not just in the screen design but down in the data and information source so the system is managing by exception.

The top point I raised is the rotating staff, discussing this last week with a couple of customers, this is a huge issue, I have spoken before about Operator Training Systems, but along with that must come a “natural” navigation. The users need intuitive navigation around screens, accessing the information they need, to make the decision, and take the required action. The interface may not be the desktop or control room experience it may start there, but it may also be at home, on the web, or roaming.

Consider screens and navigation designed for the desktop, now consider the Ipad, where the real estate is smaller, experience is “touch not click”, the desktop design will probably not be practical. Does this mean as a designer you have design different windows, and especially different navigation experiences or has the paradigm changed that this one window must be able to hosted in both environments, and the navigation/ layout for the experience changes. Yes the day of the HMI Application is over, it’s layout and windows been specific to location/ device and experience.

Layouts need to define where windows appear, layouts will be associated with the device and person. Example: I may have my desktop control experience, but I will have my Ipad control experience, and a different one for industrial, mobile device experience. Each with their own layout, and associated navigation, yet the same windows and information can be accessed.

Model driven navigation is required, so as you drill through the experience, to different levels of the model, the navigational experience must evolve driven from  the model. This allows the evolution of the model to happen, with no change required to operational experience as the new model extensions will be naturally available.

People often ask me why cannot the classic InTouch application work for the modern HMI, well the HMI products like InTouch, Citect, Ifix etc were built for local, one experience, one device, that is why we are evolving the InTouch experience to modern requirement. Next week I want continue the discussion on the "Intutive" navigation concept.