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