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Controls GUI Strategies @ICALEPCS 2025
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Monroe Room (6th Floor) (Palmer House Hilton, Chicago)
Monroe Room (6th Floor)
Palmer House Hilton, Chicago
The Palmer House Hilton
17 East Monroe Street
Chicago, IL 60603
Chris Roderick
(CERN),
Stephane Deghaye
(CERN)
Description
Are you struggling with a GUI strategy? Wondering which direction and technology to choose? Java? Web? Python? Qt? Do you have people responsible for application development as a secondary activity, who can't or won't follow the technology evolution? Come along to this workshop to learn and discuss the latest status and plans around the GUI solutions used in Control systems across the world. Explore some of the more key technical aspects, ask your questions and make new contacts.
Following on from previous GUI Strategies workshops (2024@NOBUGS, 2023@ICALEPCS, and 2022 online) this workshop aims to bring together interested parties to learn and discuss about various aspects such as:
- UX, User Requirements, Usage Telemetry, Design Considerations
- UI Customizations, UI Building Blocks
- Custom Low/No-code UI platforms
Although the workshop is only 1 day, it takes place, in-person, before the ICALEPCS 2025 conference and thus it will enable you to bootstrap your understanding of the GUI area of Controls. You can then take the many opportunities throughout the conference week to go into more details with relevant people or get the most out of the dedicated conference presentations and posters.
Contact gui-workshop-icalepcs2025@cern.ch with any questions.
Registration
Controls GUI Strategies @ ICALEPCS 2025
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In-person Registration
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2
Welcome & IntroductionSpeakers: Chris Roderick (CERN), Stephane Deghaye (CERN)
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Setting the Scene: Latest State of Play at Participating InstitutesConveners: Chris Roderick (CERN), Stephane Deghaye (CERN)
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Latest State of Play at Participating Institutes
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3
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10:30
Coffee Break
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Doing the right things: User Requirements, Getting Feedback, Designing the UXConveners: Chris Roderick (CERN), Stephane Deghaye (CERN)
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4
Build Fast, Learn Fast: The Case for Prototyping First
As an application is designed and developed, it is key to get feedback early from the users. Incorporating users in your process ensures that you build an application that not only meets the needs of your users, but also an application that users want to use. Early prototyping can be a valuable tool used to get feedback quickly, and can save time and effort in the long run. Prototyping helps developers and designers understand user workflows and how they engage with the application while mitigating potential pain points and challenges.
Speaker: Madelyn Polzin -
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UX Research for Design Optimization: Insights from the ROCK-IT User Interviews
User-centered design is essential for scientific GUIs, in which complex workflows and time pressure often challenge usability. Understanding the types of users and responding to their needs leads to increased productivity, higher user satisfaction, and supports building a broader user community.
This presentation will share results from the user interviews made for the Helmholtz-funded ROCK-IT project in Germany, that develops all necessary tools for the automation and remote access of in-situ and operando catalysis synchrotron experiments. The interviews were mainly conducted at the P65 beamline of Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY; to get insights of user behavior, pain points, and priorities, while creating a platform to discuss GUI optimization based on users’ needs.Speaker: Dr Zeynep Isil Isik Dursun (DESY) -
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Unlocking insights into user behaviour through frontend telemetry
Accelerator controls applications often include multiple complex workflows intertwined together, which can result in GUIs that are counter-intuitive. While increasing effort is being invested in user interviews, mock-up demonstrations, and prototyping, these methods are not always sufficient. Furthermore, many tools have been developed over the years based on past user feedback, which may no longer be relevant or the most optimal. Instead of repeatedly conducting rounds of interviews and mock-ups, can we find a way to gain insights into user behavior—minimizing both our effort and the users’—to create more optimized solutions?
Speaker: Anti Asko (CERN) -
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Enhancing User Interfaces (and Harnessing Automation): First steps
At the European XFEL, as part of the facility's Strategy 2030+, we've established a cross-functional working group to optimize beamline operator workflows by improving user interfaces and implementing strategic automation. We started by having semi-structured conversations with instrument scientists to understand the current state and define the project scope. Clear patterns emerged: interfaces should be simpler and more consistent, and they should surface critical run-time information and next actions at a glance. In this presentation, we will share our discovery approach, including interview process and observations, synthesis of collected data into concrete problem statements, as well as our early findings that are shaping the next phase. We will illustrate how these findings translate into near- and long-term opportunities for impact.
Speaker: Cammille Carinan
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4
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12:30
Lunch
Lunch / Networking
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Doing things right: Providing GUI Building BlocksConveners: Chris Roderick (CERN), Stephane Deghaye (CERN)
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Balancing Act: Navigating Customization in UI
Customization in control system applications can empower users to build solutions that fit their needs on a personal level. However, customization can also impact the usability of an application. This presentation is intended to start the conversation on the power of customization and finding a solution that works for your lab and your users.
Speaker: Madelyn Polzin -
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The Accelerator UX Working Group
During February 26–28, 2025, the first-ever particle accelerator user interface/user experience (UI/UX) workshop was held at SLAC. Attendees had backgrounds ranging from software development to control systems management and human factors science. The workshop began with participants discussing the current state of UI/UX procedures and practices at their respective laboratories to share experiences and learn from one another. Additional discussions focused on how to effectively integrate UI/UX best practices into actionable goals for developers, managers, and operators when working on new or existing interfaces. The goal of the working group is to create a website that will guide developers, managers, scientists, and end users at accelerator laboratories in incorporating UI/UX best practices into software development. The working group continues to meet virtually toward this goal, and is planning a second workshop for next year.
Speakers: Madelyn Polzin, Seij De Leon (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Tiffany Tran (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) -
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BEC Widgets: A Modern Modular Framework for Beamline Experiment Control
BEC Widgets is a modular Qt6 (PySide6) GUI framework developed to streamline usage of Beamline Experiment Control (BEC) at the Swiss Light Source, Paul Scherrer Institute. Emphasizing plug-and-play functionality and rapid adaptability, it enhances scientific workflows by allowing dynamic reconfiguration of interfaces—even during live experiments.
Built from independent widget components, BEC Widgets enables users to assemble custom applications by flexibly combining pre-built elements. Interfaces can be created or modified via the command-line, interactively in the main application, or visually through Qt Designer. Users can also extend functionality by implementing custom widgets tailored to beamline needs.
Integrated with the BEC system, BEC Widgets uses Redis as a high-performance shared memory backend to synchronize data across all components. This supports seamless interaction with scans, acquisition, live monitoring, automation, and device control. A server–client architecture with RPC ensures GUI stability, isolating it from command-line operations. PyQtGraph-based visualization further boosts real-time data analysis. Crucially, all business logic is kept out of the UI layer, ensuring clean separation of concerns and maintainable code. Released as open source, BEC Widgets invites collaboration and reuse across the scientific community.Speaker: Jan Wyzula (PSI) -
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Component Libraries for Bluesky Beamlines
At the Advanced Light Source new strategies are being employed to create maintainable web-based controls and data analysis applications for Bluesky beamlines. Our approach centers on creating modular library components available in different software languages that address requirements shared across multiple beamlines. A combination of modern tooling and packaging systems has enabled a development procedure that encourages reuse, consistency, and long term maintainability.
Speaker: Seij De Leon (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
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8
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15:30
Coffee
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Flexibility & Efficiency: Taking Expert GUI Developers Out of the Equation?
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Integrating scripting in a rapid application development platform
The Web Rapid Application development Platform (WRAP) developed at CERN, has been used extensively the past few years by a users across the organization to create applications for monitoring and control of their equipment. However, user feedback identified the inability to define custom, user-specific, logic for data manipulation as a major bottleneck. We'll present how this functionality was enabled and walk you though the new user workflow in our system.
Speaker: Epameinondas Galatas (CERN) -
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Advancing Graphical Interfaces for Tango Controls: Synoptic and SVG Widget Development in TarantaSpeakers: Carla Caldeira Takahashi, Yimeng Li
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UI Generation in the APS Build SystemSpeaker: Keenan Lang (Argonne National Laboratory)
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Procedurally-generated beamline controls and monitoring UI
For the last 20 years, information, monitoring, and control of beamline elements has been done using tabular UIs. We'll demonstrate how using the same information on the backend, we can construct a new UI that matches the physical layout of the beamline: Synoptics. The result is both more information dense and more intuative for users. Two use cases will be presented, one for geometric information, valuable for commissioning, and another for controls and monitoring of the beamline state used by operations.
Speaker: Epameinondas Galatas (CERN) -
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Modern & Responsive Web UISpeaker: Robert Nagler (RadiaSoft)
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Wrapping up: Discussion Around What We Have Seen, Outstanding Points, Ideas, Collaboration Opportunities, etc.Conveners: Chris Roderick (CERN), Stephane Deghaye (CERN)
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Close OutSpeakers: Chris Roderick (CERN), Stephane Deghaye (CERN)
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