TLDR; The High Performance HMI

TLDR is design to save you time in selecting your reading materials. If you are in the controls profession, you have a lot to cover and really need to pick and choose. That said, I highly recommend The High Performance HMI. Human Machine Interfaces are the only topic I have found as generally impactful as alarm management. Every plant has them, every modern machine has at least one... Why not make the most of yours?

The High Performance HMI discusses common pitfalls and places of improvements for the HMI in your system. Obviously, most of our work is custom-everything. The problem with custom is (perhaps trivially) the utter lack of standardization and the infrequent improvements on "something that works." I agree, if it works, you should not fix it... but you should never stop striving to improve on it!

Topics covered hit every plant and machine that I have touched. These include...

• Poor color selection

• Unique navigation per site (even within the same firm!)

• Different procedures for finding graphics per plant

• Inconsistent controls nomenclature

• Using HMIs as P&IDs

• Meaningless / distracting graphics

• And more!

If you work in controls, you should get this. It's a 10/10 read. If you work at a plant and are considering upgrading your controls, I advise you do the same.