Walk up to a lot of HMIs and you'll see the same thing. Bright green pumps, red valves, blue tanks, 3D pipes, a spinning fan icon, flashing everything...and an operator who stopped reading it a year ago. When every color means something, nothing does.
The fix has a name: high-performance HMI. It's the thinking baked into ISA-101 (ANSI/ISA-101.01-2015), the HMI design standard, and the gist is simple. Make normal boring and make abnormal obvious.
In practice that means a gray or muted background, equipment drawn in plain grays, and color saved for things that need attention. If a running pump and a stopped pump look nearly the same and a pump in alarm turns bright, the operator's eye goes straight to the problem. When the whole screen is a rainbow, the one thing that matters hides in plain sight.
Numbers help more when they come with context. A tank level of 62% means little by itself. A level shown on a small bar with the normal range marked tells the operator in half a second whether to care. Trends beat single numbers for anything that drifts, like temperatures or pressures.
Layout matters too. Most good HMIs end up in layers: an overview that shows the whole area at a glance, then screens for each unit, then detail screens for the nitty-gritty. If an operator has to dig three screens deep to find out the line is down, the overview isn't doing its job.
Then there's alarms, which deserve their own rant. If an operator sees hundreds of alarms a shift, most of them nuisance or stale, they'll learn to acknowledge without reading. That's how real alarms get missed. Alarm management has its own standard, ISA-18.2, and the core idea is that every alarm should mean an operator needs to do something. If nobody needs to act, it shouldn't be an alarm. Clean up the chattering ones, the ones that fire during normal startups, and the ones nobody remembers adding.
A few small things go a long way, too. Write a short style guide, even a single page, so every screen uses the same colors, fonts and symbols. Use words operators actually say. Make buttons big enough to hit with a gloved hand on a touchscreen. And ask a couple of your best operators to try new screens before they go live. They'll tell you in five minutes what a design meeting misses in five weeks.
You don't have to redo every screen at once. Pick the overview and the screens that get the most use, fix those, and keep going from there.