How Bally Design Helped Conair Dramatically Improve Their HMI Platform
After hearing from customers that training and employee turnover was hampering their operations, the Conair Group—the market leader in innovative auxiliary equipment solutions for plastics processors—partnered with Bally Design to rethink and create a common HMI (human-machine interface) from the ground up for all their PLC controlled equipment.
What makes the equipment unique? What do they all share?
Conair markets a wide variety of products — each with their own task-specific functionality, features, workflows, and data sets. So Bally Design began with a research effort to better understand the critical functionality of the equipment and the unique needs of users. After interviewing Conair’s customers and other stakeholders, Bally Design built numerous UI (user interface) prototypes to test menu structures, user workflows, screen layouts, nomenclature, and aesthetic approaches.
This iterative approach resulted in a much-simplified UI design which features a common screen architecture with consistent control locations, behaviors, and interactions across product lines. The way in which an operator navigates the screens, how information is presented, and the mechanisms for adjusting settings are the same regardless of device complexity. The HMI also includes context-specific help available from any screen to assist operators. This new, intuitive UI makes the machines far more accessible and significantly easier to learn.
Simplifying the information to streamline the operation.
In addition to the differences in core functionality associated with each machine, a key challenge was accommodating the variability in screen sizes. Conair machines are equipped with a variety of touchscreens ranging in size from 15″ down to a compact 4.3″. Operators often wear gloves, so the button sizes needed to be large enough and spaced accordingly to reduce errors.
“Engineers, in general, like lots of information on the screen and trying to get them to simplify is really hard,” says Matt Shope, Vice President, Engineering & Product Development. “That’s where Bally Design and their expertise were necessary. They pushed the team to present only the most important information.”
By creating a cohesive set of controls that all look and behave the same, Bally Design enabled users to quickly learn and efficiently operate all the devices on the shop floor leading to fewer errors and downtime.
HMI Design Guide & Digital Asset Management.
To support the software development teams building the Conair HMIs and to maintain consistency as more and more products are released, Bally Design created web-based, browser-accessible documentation of the design system which details the workflows, menus, screen layouts, and visual brand language such as color and type; provides up-to-date design guidelines; and includes downloadable libraries of icons and other graphics.
About Bally Design
For over 50 years, Bally Design has been helping clients create new solutions and reimagine established products, ensuring they have a high degree of usability, functionality, and aesthetic appeal. From discovery to concept exploration and development, through prototyping and the transition to production, our product designs are known for being highly innovative, yet surprisingly practical. To learn more, visit ballydesign.com.