Screen design, navigation hierarchy, alarm displays, trend displays, mimics, and user management — the High Performance HMI philosophy that turns a SCADA screen into a genuine situational-awareness tool instead of a wall of colorful noise.
Module 8 covered how SCADA gathers and stores data across a site. This module covers the screen an operator actually looks at for an entire shift — and why the instinct to make that screen bright, busy, and colorful is exactly backwards. The High Performance HMI research that came out of incident investigations like Texas City reframed HMI design around a single question: what does an operator need to notice in the three seconds it takes to glance at a screen, and what is actively competing with that signal for their attention.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a grayscale background with color reserved for abnormal conditions outperforms a colorful default HMI, how ISA-101's four-level navigation hierarchy keeps an operator from hunting through clutter during an upset, and what actually separates a well-rationalized alarm system from one that trains operators to ignore it — the same alarm-flood failure mode Module 12's safety content returns to directly.