New-Tech Europe | April 2016 | Digital edition

need, DMM users have had to turn to other kinds of instruments to go “beyond the numbers.” At the same time, changes in user characteristics and expectations about ease of use have led instrument manufacturers to create user interfaces that incorporate many of the same control and display innovations that have revolutionized consumer products like tablets, smartphones, and cameras. The most prominent of these innovations is the use of advanced capacitive touchscreens with multi-point, pan-pinch-zoom- swipe operation, which simplifies interacting with data. By providing immediate visual feedback and a more content-rich display, touchscreens support faster learning than other control and display approaches and give users greater confidence in what they’re doing. This can substantially reduce user learning curves and training requirements while improving measurement integrity and testing efficiency. The intuitive nature of touchscreen interfaces allows users at all levels of testing sophistication to become experts quickly. They also offer the advantage of providing instant access to context-sensitive help, which eliminates the need to consult a user manual to get an instrument up and running. For those relatively new to testing, these instruments can speed up the measurement process by helping users test accurately and get results quickly, and allows them to focus on their next breakthrough rather than on learning how to configure the instrument. With simplified setups configured from the front panel (Figure 4), such instruments support faster time to measurement and significant improvements in test

Figure 1. Early instruments with analog interfaces required multiple front panel dials to configure measurements and results had to be transcribed manually.

Figure 2. Starting in the 1960s and continuing through the 1980s, LED and LCD digital displays and pushbutton controls increasingly replaced analog dials and knobs.

Figure 3. Vacuum fluorescent displays and multi-function buttons became increasingly common in the next stage of user interface evolution.

vendors often assigned multiple functions and performance options to the same front panel button (Figure 3). A Look Forward Over the last decade, instrument vendors have been striving to develop user interfaces that offer their customers more information faster. Due to shrinking design cycles, many

engineers are under greater time-to- market pressure than ever before, so they need to acquire reliable data on experimental devices and circuits as quickly as possible. Although digital multimeters (DMMs), for example, have long been fixtures on every electrical engineer’s benchtop, they haven’t always provided the type or depth of information users need to do their jobs. To get the answers they

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