Adopting HCI and Usability for Developing Industry 4.0 Applications: A case study

Nowadays, the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) is setting new goals for production and impacting on industrial values. Although integrating Industry 4.0 will automate the production process and reduce the involvement of manpower in industries but the inclusion of effective Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is required to ensure the efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction towards a system developed for adopting the Industry 4.0 paradigm in an industry. Therefore, the objective of this research is to assess the significance of considering HCI and usability issues at the early stage of developing any software system from Industry 4.0 perspective. To attain this objective, a prototypical application was developed to automate the lime production, control, and monitoring system from the Industry 4.0 perspective. Later, the system was evaluated by 9 participants (evaluators) using the Cognitive Walkthrough approach, and the prototype was refined based on its outcomes. The refined system was again evaluated by 11 participants following the Cognitive Walkthrough and showed that the usability improved due to considering the usability evaluation at the early stage of the development process of the application.