At Machine Vision Consulting (MVC), the user experience is factored into every product we design. As our vision engineers address the vision and hardware requirements of the system, they also partner with our usability expert to review the application from a user perspective. Our user experience reviews look at the application in terms of user roles, task scenarios, information layout, user interactions and visual displays. The goal is to provide an intuitive interface that becomes transparent to the user achieving the task.

MVC understands that not all users are alike and not all applications are alike. Our user experience review includes identifying the each user group (e.g., Admin, Supervisor, Line workers.) and their tasks. We review all the tasks within likely user scenarios breaking them into “core” tasks for the running of the application, and “support” or “maintenance” tasks that may impact the reconfiguration of the system. These tasks are prioritized within their group (user role and type of task – core or support), based on frequency and criticality of the required action.

Knowing the priority of user tasks, common user interface design principles are applied in laying out the information display for task management. The display is laid out based on the value of the real estate. For our culture, users scan information, from top to bottom and left to right. Hence, the most valuable real estate is in the top left corner, then across the top, then down the page, with the least valuable space (or lowest priority) being in the bottom right corner.  The value of display real estate is used in two ways:

1. For the overall display of information: Depending on the product and the required tasks, the content layout usually provides key identifying information in the top left of the display, critical indicators across the top, with core information in the center and reference or supporting information below or on the right side.
2. For the logical flow of user tasks: such that a particular sequence of tasks will start with the key information and initial action occurring in the top left of the screen, and the final commit action on the lower right.

User roles, task scenarios, and the layout of information are three considerations integrated into the design of our products to insure that user tasks are logically sequenced and the information needed to make critical decisions is highly visible. In part 2 of this series, we’ll look at how MVC incorporates key usability principles to simplify the user interface of complex machine vision systems.

Tags: machine vision product design, usability in machine vision applications, user interface design

This entry was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 2:43 pm and is filed under MVC Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.