UX design is no longer just an aesthetic detail in critical industrial environments.
In process industries like chemical plants, refineries, and pulp and paper mills, the way an operator interacts with a distributed control system, commonly known as DCS, can mean the difference between a stable operation and a serious accident. That is not an exaggeration. When we talk about safety in this context, we are talking about human lives, multimillion-dollar equipment, and processes that simply cannot be paused. The pressure an operator faces during a process anomaly is immense, and any friction in the interface can amplify that stress to a dangerous level.
What a lot of people still have not realized is that most of the risk does not come from mechanical or electrical failures. It comes from human error. 👀 A confusing display, an alarm that pops up at the wrong time, a piece of information buried three screens deep. These are the kinds of problems that lead operators to make bad decisions under pressure, often without even realizing they were working with incomplete or poorly presented information. As Valtteri Mustonen, solution manager at Valmet, puts it, the human factor is the biggest contributor to operational risks. Misreading a value or making a small mistake can be enough to trigger a serious incident. That is exactly where UX design comes into play in industrial control systems.
In this article, we will explore how a well-designed interface goes far beyond looks and becomes, in practice, a direct tool for accident prevention. We will also look at a real-world example of how Valmet put this into practice when developing its new distributed control system, DNAe. 🏭
Why interface design matters so much in industrial environments
In process industries, operators work long shifts, monitoring dozens or even hundreds of variables at the same time. Fatigue is real. Cognitive load is high. And when something starts drifting out of spec, response time matters a lot. In that scenario, the control system interface is not just a screen. It is the primary communication channel between the physical process and the operator’s mind. If that channel delivers noise instead of clarity, risk grows proportionally.
A poorly designed UX can lead to data misinterpretation, delayed responses, alarm fatigue, and operational errors. A well-designed UX, on the other hand, supports faster decisions, reduces training time, boosts operator confidence, and promotes more stable operations. As Anna Sydänmaa, business manager at Valmet, states, UX design is no longer a luxury in safety-critical process industries. It plays an important role in how operators control the process, improve their situational awareness, and make the right calls under pressure.
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The history of industrial safety is full of incidents where poor interface design was a significant contributing factor. Alarms cascading out of control, overwhelming operators with hundreds of simultaneous notifications. Displays with inconsistent color scales, where green on one screen meant something entirely different from green on another. Critical information placed in low-visibility areas. Each of these problems seems small on its own, but together they build an environment where human error becomes almost inevitable, not because the operator is incompetent, but because the system failed to support their situational awareness.
UX and UI are not the same thing
An important clarification worth making here, since a lot of people mix them up. Nina Flink, UX manager at Valmet, is intentional about separating the two concepts. The user interface, or UI, focuses on the interactions and the visual and interactive elements, such as layout, colors, typography, buttons, and icons. It involves the clarity of process displays, the intuitiveness of navigation, the consistency of symbols and terminology, system responsiveness, and how information is prioritized during both normal operation and abnormal situations.
UX, on the other hand, is broader. In a DCS environment, it takes into account the physical workplace, collaboration aspects, workstations, hardware, and tools. UX includes UI but is not limited to it. It is the operator’s complete experience within that work context, and it is precisely because of this broader scope that it becomes so critical for safety. Understanding this difference helps explain why investing only in pretty screens does not solve the problem. You need to think about the entire ecosystem the operator is working within.
The role of situational awareness in industrial process control
The concept of situational awareness was extensively studied in the context of aviation and later expanded to other high-risk domains, including process industries. The central idea is that an operator needs, at any given moment, to have an accurate mental representation of the current state of the system they are controlling. And to build that representation, they depend almost entirely on what the interface presents to them. If the interface omits or confuses, the mental model breaks down, and decision-making breaks down with it.
A well-designed UX helps operators maintain situational awareness by ensuring that critical information is available when it matters most. By reducing unnecessary mental effort, it enables more confident decisions and decreases the chance of errors. This depends on clear visibility of process conditions, alarms that communicate priority and intent without overwhelming the user, and workflows that mirror actual operational practices rather than purely theoretical models.
In an industrial control environment, this translates into practical questions: Can the operator quickly identify which variable is out of range? Can they tell the difference between a high-priority alarm and an informational alert without reading a manual? Is the navigation between different areas of the process intuitive enough that they do not lose track during an emergency? UX also considers how efficiently operators carry out everyday tasks like reviewing trends, acknowledging alarms, adjusting setpoints, and running diagnostics, as well as how quickly they can understand abnormal conditions and act appropriately.
That is why UX design projects for industrial environments need to be developed in close collaboration with the operators themselves. There is no point in creating a good-looking interface that a designer considers intuitive if it does not reflect the mental models of the people who will actually use it. As Sydänmaa puts it, safety in process industries cannot be achieved by focusing on equipment alone. True safety depends on how people operate, maintain, and manage the processes, ensuring they have the right information at the right time. 🎯
How Valmet’s DNAe rethinks the interface in distributed control systems
Valmet, a Finnish company with a strong presence in process industries, especially in pulp, paper, and energy, developed DNAe, a new web-based DCS, with a clear premise: UX design needed to be treated as a safety matter, not an aesthetic one. One of the driving forces behind the project was the growing need for an easy-to-use, intuitive interface that requires less operator training, especially given a significant wave of retirements in the sector’s workforce.
To tackle that challenge, in addition to engineers and software developers, the team includes more than ten UX specialists responsible for defining and governing all configuration and UI workflows, how they function, and how they are visually presented. As Nina Flink explains, the work starts with understanding the big picture, meaning how people want to work, what they need, and what the process demands. Only after that does the team dive into the details.
The UI was structured around practical scenarios and operator needs rather than being driven solely by the process itself. Visual elements are used consistently across the entire system. Alarm colors, for example, are strictly limited to relevant conditions. Critical information is presented according to each user’s role, which eliminates the ambiguity that used to exist when different areas of the process had different visual conventions. With DNAe, an operator who has never accessed a particular screen can quickly interpret the state of that section of the process because the system always speaks the same visual language.
Intuitive dashboards and clear views of the process and subprocesses allow users to focus on what really matters. Information is prioritized so operators can quickly detect even subtle changes and respond without delay, based on their responsibilities and regardless of their location. Trends, event information, and reports are also available within the same UI. At its core, a well-designed UX allows the operator to achieve situational awareness at a glance, without having to hunt for information or mentally piece together essential data one fragment at a time. 🏭
Human-centered design as an industrial safety strategy
What the Valmet example makes clear is that treating UX design as a safety strategy is not a passing trend. It is a logical and necessary response to a reality that industrial accident data has been confirming for decades. As Flink points out, when situational awareness is strong, operators can respond faster and more accurately, reducing the risk of errors and unsafe conditions. In high-risk environments where chemicals and flammable materials are part of the daily routine, good UX can be the difference between a near-miss and a serious incident.
Emergency situations develop very quickly, as Mustonen reminds us. Operators need to see immediately what is happening in order to react the right way. By organizing information in a way that reflects real operating conditions, effective UX design helps interrupt errors before they escalate and directly contributes to safer and more reliable process operations.
Investing in quality UX design for industrial control systems is, in practice, investing in an additional layer of protection that goes beyond physical interlocks, automated safety systems, and operational procedures. It means recognizing that the human operator remains a central element in the control loop and that they deserve tools designed to amplify their ability to make good decisions, especially when time is short and the consequences are high. When a control system is designed with that mindset, safety stops depending solely on the individual competence of the operator and begins to be sustained by the quality of the digital work environment they use as well.
This represents an important paradigm shift in process industries. For a long time, the interface was seen as an accessory to the control system, something that came after the process engineering and automation were already figured out. Today, the most advanced projects are flipping that logic and putting the operator experience at the center of system architecture decisions. The result is not just a more pleasant interface to use. It is an operational environment that is safer, more efficient, and more resilient to human error, which is exactly what process industries need to operate with confidence over the long term. ✅
