Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

Human-Centered Design in Action

Posted in Technologies, Usability on Monday, August 29th, 2011. No comments yet
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BayCHI, the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the ACM [Association for Computing Machinery] Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) held a BOF (birds of a feather) session on usability engineering. This session featured a presentation, Human-Centered Design in Action, by LUMA Institute’s Pete Maher and Emerson’s Jay Elkerton. Pete is the chief operating [...]

Growing Number of Process Automation-Related How To Videos

Posted in Technologies, Usability on Friday, March 18th, 2011. No comments yet
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One of the big benefits that free services such as YouTube has brought us is the proliferation of “how to” videos. Seeing a visual and audio display of someone showing how to do something really speeds up the learning process when compared to text alone, or text with pictures. Need to do a home project [...]

Streamlining Automation I/O Rework

Posted in Project Services, Usability on Thursday, December 9th, 2010. No comments yet
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My automation-related blogs RSS feed alerted to me to a Control Engineering Asia article, Simplifying Connections, written by Emerson’s Nathan Pettus. I’d not yet seen this article published a few months ago. In it, Nathan describes the challenges many project engineers face as they try to keep their automation projects on time and on budget. [...]

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Human Centered Design Approach for Level Control

Posted in Foundation Fieldbus, Measurement, Usability on Wednesday, November 17th, 2010. No comments yet
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You may have heard about the focus on Human Centered Design (HCD) approaches across Emerson Process Management. The importance of this trend was highlighted in a recent Sound Off! blog post on Human Factors Engineering. This HCD focus over the past several years has led to the release of new technologies such as electronic marshalling [...]

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ARC Interview with Peter Zornio on Human Centered Design

Posted in Technologies, Usability on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010. No comments yet
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Yesterday, I saw two tweets (here and here) from the ARC Advisory Group, from their ARC_Advisory twitter account. These tweets shared news of YouTube interview postings with Emerson Process Management’s Chief Strategic Officer, Peter Zornio. In part 1 and part 2 of the interview, ARC’s Larry O’Brien asked Peter about Human Centered Design (HCD) and [...]

Reducing Complexity to Connect People with Useful Information

Posted in Technologies, Usability on Friday, May 14th, 2010. No comments yet
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Let’s close the week with a peek at a new whitepaper from Emerson’s DeltaV team, Emerson Process Management’s Human Centered Design Philosophy: Conquering Complexity. The team is led by DeltaV brand manager, Rune Reppenhagen. The intent of this human-centered design (HCD) focus is to eliminate unnecessary work, to reduce the applied technology’s complexity, and to [...]

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A View into the Marshalltown Emerson Innovation Center through Social Media

Posted in Final Control Element, Plant Equipment, Usability on Tuesday, May 11th, 2010. No comments yet
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The big news today is the unveiling of the $30 million Emerson Innovation Center to advance Fisher technology in Marshalltown, Iowa. From the release: The world’s appetite for energy is driving the development of next-generation nuclear plants, mega-train liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants, and large oil and gas refineries, which require larger capacities and highly [...]

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Upcoming OPC Xi Events and Available Downloads

Posted in Interoperability, Usability on Thursday, April 1st, 2010. No comments yet
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Update: OPC Xi is now called OPC .NET 3.0. Original post: It’s been a while since I’ve shared an update from Emerson’s Lee Neitzel on the OPC Xi standard. If you’re not familiar with this new addition to the OPC Foundation‘s family of communications standards, here are three prior posts that give an overview of [...]

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Can DCS HMI Impact Operator Performance?

Posted in Operator Performance, Usability on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009. No comments yet
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So asks one of the liveliest conversations going on the Process Automation Usability Project site. The thread begins with an observation by the Putman Media staff: Many recent accidents have clearly identified the contribution of bad alarm management practices as a major contribution. Action has been taken by regulators, standards bodies and customer forums to [...]

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