Oil Boiler Isolation Switch.

mapj1:

secondly it's beyond the wit and imagination of a Millennial to be able to use it, they don't do analogue. ? 

There are quite a few that do not do digits very well either to be fair...

On complex control panels (kit which a decade or two ago would have been a console that carried 20 moving coil meters) we go to great pains not to have an array of 7 segment displays, or ons screen and hidden 20 push menus, but to mimic either an analogue movement or a bar-graph of some kind, even if it is a picture of a moving needle meter on an LCD screen. We also arrange all the metering so that the 'happy' state is with the needles or bar-graphs all in the same position - the eye is very  fast at spotting the one meter pointing the other way or the one bar-graph that is lower than the others.

It is too easy in the digits to read 100, 100, 10,0  as 3 identical readings, but 2 needles flickering around 2 O'clock and one sulking at about 9 o'clock is very obvious  even to a passing glance to alert that one PA has dropped  out or one battery is flat or whatever.

Like putting the buttons far enough apart and with a positive click, and all rotary controls to "wind up" intuitively, i.e. increase clockwise, all this 'human factors' stuff is nothing new in the last 50 years, but for for software it seems folk forget it.



 

 

mapj1:

secondly it's beyond the wit and imagination of a Millennial to be able to use it, they don't do analogue. ? 

There are quite a few that do not do digits very well either to be fair...

On complex control panels (kit which a decade or two ago would have been a console that carried 20 moving coil meters) we go to great pains not to have an array of 7 segment displays, or ons screen and hidden 20 push menus, but to mimic either an analogue movement or a bar-graph of some kind, even if it is a picture of a moving needle meter on an LCD screen. We also arrange all the metering so that the 'happy' state is with the needles or bar-graphs all in the same position - the eye is very  fast at spotting the one meter pointing the other way or the one bar-graph that is lower than the others.

It is too easy in the digits to read 100, 100, 10,0  as 3 identical readings, but 2 needles flickering around 2 O'clock and one sulking at about 9 o'clock is very obvious  even to a passing glance to alert that one PA has dropped  out or one battery is flat or whatever.

Like putting the buttons far enough apart and with a positive click, and all rotary controls to "wind up" intuitively, i.e. increase clockwise, all this 'human factors' stuff is nothing new in the last 50 years, but for for software it seems folk forget it.