Top Industrial GUI Trends for 2023

Before we get into GUI Industrial trends, it is important to know what exactly GUI is and how relevant it is in our lives. PCs, smartphones, washing machines, thermostats, ovens, medical equipment, smartwatches, and many other commercial digital products use GUIs as their default interfaces. Along with a text-based interface, these devices interact with graphic icons and audible indicators.

With any other GUIs, industrial GUI trends emphasize ease of use, comfort, user-friendliness, and safety over anything else, allowing users to quickly understand, comprehend, and react to the information. As these points are always on priority for GUI trends, the question remains -is it possible to cover these priorities in every market?

To interact with industrial GUI, users require accurate and easy-to-understand data. Data demands from interfaces make industrial GUI much different from others and chasing recent trends here might only sometimes work.

Why are the latest GUI design trends essential to be followed?

The demand for GUI in the industrial sector has reached a new high. Industrial organizations as manufacturers and commercials are investing a lot of resources into building better ways of interacting with their end users. Aiming to make industrial GUIs more straightforward will result in a more versatile, efficient, and cost-efficient GUI design.

As such, companies strive to create interfaces which are simple, effective, and convenient yet pleasing to the eye. The user's initial impression of a brand or company is heavily influenced by the product's UX and UI, so ensuring they meet industry standards when creating a digital product becomes essential.

Here are the Top Industrial GUI Trends of 2023

Dark Mode User Interface

Dark Mode UI replaces the background whitespace with a black or dark background. Dark mode reduces the strain on the eyes, especially in dim-lit work environments and after sunset, even in well-lit spaces. Dark Mode UI is an all-time favourite choice for the UI as it is elegant, prestigious, and gives a sleek look while being power efficient.

Dark Mode UI can be a default mode or an optional mode.

2023 will see Dark Mode being available to more and more industrial equipment.

Minimalist UI

Minimalism is a concept taking on the world in all fields of design.

Minimalism strives to attain maximum efficiency and functionality with the least resources. It works so by stripping down products to their essentials.

A Minimalist UI enables the operator to focus only on the relevant and important details and reduces the system's load by taking away all the bells and whistles.

A Minimalist UI features only simple lines, only a few colors, and careful placement of those lines and colors. This creates more space to display in detail the useful parameters. In 2023, minimalism-inspired Industrial UI will be a preferred choice for a great display of critical information while reducing the load on the processor.

High Resolution in Images/graphics used

In recent years there has been a significant change in the quality of images and graphics used on commercial electronic devices, whether the washing machine or the coffee machine. There has been a great focus on maximizing the pixel density to get better resolutions and decrease memory requirements. This not only reduces the screen load time but also provides users with an optimal user experience.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) based UI

AI is slowly and gradually creeping into our daily lives. It is being used all over the world to improve the user experience with the help of Machine learning. Machine Learning is data-based; the data is collected over a period.

The AI, based on the data predicts the next set of actions. This greatly helps the operator reduce the load and automatically present the next logical step. In 2023, AI & Machine Learning based UI will make their way into Industrial UI to reduce the operator's workload and the number of human errors.

Such UI will also enable businesses to incorporate automation wherever the process is repetitive or does not require human intervention; as such, more and more businesses will choose them in 2023.

Animations & Motion in UI

Industrial UI can greatly benefit by incorporating animations and motions in the design.
Animations and motion help break the monotony and are a great way to grab attention while visually pleasing.

The wise use of animations can guide even the entry-level operator through all the processes involved in completing a task. Also, such a dynamic design requires the operator to focus on the screen, hence reducing the occurrences of human error in the process.

Gesture-based UI

Gesture-based UI refers to using specific physical gestures to operate the interface of electronic devices. In an industrial/control environment, gesture-based UIs can be a huge success where you are restricted to physical touch. Gestural UIs are already commonplace in the automotive UI and medical UI  industries. Many high-end industrial equipments are already using cameras and sensors to track movements and gestures.

Developers and designers are already getting a leg up on their competition by integrating these technologies into their development frameworks. The demand for gesture-based GUIs is rising, and so is the technology around them.

Low-Code/No-Code GUI design & development framework

By using Low-Code/No-Code frameworks, manufacturing and production solutions can be developed with little to no coding experience and with greater agility, flexibility, and speed. By providing parallel workflows and decoupling designer and developer environments, these platforms eradicate the reluctance associated with design iteration. So that product teams can work on optimizing the end-UX more effectively, as the design changes can now not delay or break development work. As companies focus on Composable Manufacturing, which allows them to assemble their specific solution from different applications, Low-/No-Code platforms/frameworks have become a must-have in 2023.

Conclusion

Industrial Design affects how an enterprise's personnel interact with its machinery. The life duration of an industrial component is significantly much more than those of others. As such, while designing the UI, the designers should keep the goal and components in perspective.
Human factors greatly matter in the industrial environment. A bad design induces more loads, errors, and a slow rate of production, which in turn induces a heavily load on the operator. On the other hand, a great UI reduces the load, improves the rate of production/operation, and eliminates errors and malfunctions. Technology keeps on evolving, and brands/companies should keep a pulse on the emerging GUI trends, lest they become irrelevant.