CONAIR GROUP
BALLY DESIGN PARTNERING FOR SUCCESS Founded in Pittsburgh, PA as an industrial design firm, Bally Design has partnered with companies like the Conair Group to address human-centered needs and challenges for over 50 years. The company added interface design over 20 years ago, and is now providing additional services in design strategy and product communications. Their design process is simple, yet tested. The first step to delivering a successful product is deeply understanding users and their environments. The team at Bally Design interviews users and other stakeholders to uncover and understand the challenges and user needs. From there, they develop a strategy and structure to address those needs. In harmonizing the Conair user interfaces, the team’s biggest challenge was addressing the different functionalities of each Conair product as they all have competing requirements. Common controls were developed by identifying functionalities that were similar, while product-specific functionality was addressed with contextualized information displayed to the operator. This consistent underlying structure allowed users to easily understand and find the content they need. Doing so has led to maximized workflow efficiency as a result of reduced training time and minimized user-input errors. Stan Mamula, Director of Interface Design at Bally Design commented, “It was great to work with the Conair team who kept the user at the heart of all of their work.” For more information on how Bally Design can provide value for your customers, please visit www.ballydesign.com Proven results. Time after time.
architecture from the ground up, and with no small amount of feedback to work from. “We interviewed customers. We interviewed our salespeople, service, partners, engineering and all the other key stakeholders that we could identify,” Shope recounts. “After doing that and understanding their requirements and likes and dislikes, Bally Design helped us prototype many iterations to determine the final HMI design guide that we were going to use moving forward.” This design necessitated the use of innovation, but also keeping in mind userinterface best practices such as minimum button size and text-size requirements across all the different display sizes on Conair’s equipment. These could range from as small as 4.3 inches to 7, 10 or even 15 inches. “Blender controls, for instance, need to display way more information than the HMI
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on a temperature control unit,” Shope points out. “So, we had to make sure that the menu structure and navigation, setting entry, alarm notification, icons, colours, etc. remain essentially the same.” Another challenge was prioritising information so that anything that the user needed to know was readily available, but without making the display cluttered or confusing. As an engineer, Shope understands the difficulty here.
“WE WANTED TO HAVE A COMMON USER EXPERIENCE TO HELP OUR CUSTOMERS REDUCE TRAINING TIME & INCREASE OPERATOR EFFICIENCY.”
Matt Shope, Director of Engineering, Conair Group.
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