Product

Related documents. DESIGN.md turns the principles below into tokens and design rules; ui/STYLEGUIDE.md holds component markup. The anti-references in this file are the single source for what the interface must not look like — DESIGN.md refers here instead of repeating them.

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product

Platform

web

Users

The primary users are industrial domain experts and OT practitioners who need to connect machines and data sources, build streaming pipelines, explore time-series data, and monitor operational systems without assembling multiple specialized tools or writing custom code for every use case.

Secondary users include platform administrators who operate and secure StreamPipes installations, and developers who extend the platform with custom connectors, processors, sinks, APIs, and application logic.

Users often work with complex, stateful workflows and operationally important data. The interface should help them understand system state, act confidently, and recover from problems without losing context.

Product Purpose

Apache StreamPipes is an open-source industrial IoT data platform that provides a coherent, self-service workflow for connecting industrial systems, processing live data, storing and exploring historical data, and creating operational dashboards and applications.

The product succeeds when domain experts can complete sophisticated industrial data tasks safely and efficiently, administrators can understand and manage the platform, and developers can extend it without fragmenting the user experience.

Brand Personality

Professional, beautiful, and easy to use. The interface should communicate technical credibility and operational confidence while remaining approachable for users who are experts in their domain rather than in software engineering.

Anti-references

Avoid flashy consumer-product styling, decorative complexity, dense legacy enterprise interfaces, and unfamiliar controls that make standard actions harder to recognize. Do not trade clarity, consistency, or information density for visual novelty.

Design Principles

  1. Make complex workflows feel understandable. Reveal structure and next actions progressively while preserving the context experienced users need.
  2. Show operational truth clearly. Communicate system state, data freshness, progress, errors, and consequences precisely and without relying on color alone.
  3. Earn trust through consistency. Reuse established components and familiar interaction patterns across pipelines, adapters, assets, charts, dashboards, and administration.
  4. Support novices without slowing experts. Provide guidance, sensible defaults, and recoverable actions while keeping frequent workflows efficient.
  5. Use beauty in service of the task. Apply hierarchy, typography, spacing, and restrained color to improve comprehension rather than add decoration.

Accessibility & Inclusion

Target WCAG 2.2 AA. Support complete keyboard operation, visible focus states, adequate text and non-text contrast, reduced-motion preferences, semantic and assistive-technology-friendly controls, and status communication that does not depend on color alone.