The Knowledge Is Retiring: What UI/UX Can Bring To Water Treatment
By Gulzeb Muhammadzai
Every operator knows the moment. An alarm sounds, a reading drifts, and the newest person on shift turns to the one who has been there longest. The veteran glances at the screen, walks straight to the right valve, and has it sorted in five minutes. Nobody ever wrote down how.
My team and I see this every week. We design water treatment systems and spend much of our time on site with the people who run them. The hardest part of running a plant is rarely the treatment process. It is decoding the equipment.
That matters now. According to the Brookings Institution, roughly a third of U.S. drinking water and wastewater operators will be eligible to retire by 2028, and the knowledge of how to read their plants leaves with them. There is no long line of young talent waiting to take their place. The best engineering graduates are heading to SpaceX, Tesla, and Meta. The industry's answer has been more training and, lately, more AI. Both help, but both treat the symptom. The deeper problem is that our systems were never designed to be easy to use, either for the operators leaving or for the ones we need to arrive.
Institutional Knowledge Lives In People, Not Systems
Every plant has two manuals. One sits on a shelf and describes the plant as it was designed. The other lives in the heads of its operators and describes the plant as it actually runs: which pump runs hot in August, which reading can be ignored after a backwash, which alarm means "walk over now" and which means "check it after lunch."
That second manual is institutional knowledge, kept on sticky notes, in notebooks, and mostly nowhere at all. When a system can't explain itself, the operator becomes the explanation, until the operator retires. Small systems feel this hardest. A small town may have one or two certified operators, with no overlap between them.
Ease Of Use Was Never In The Spec
Read almost any treatment system specification and you will find flow rates, removal targets, materials of construction, and redundancy requirements. You will rarely find a line asking how long it takes a new operator to understand the main screen, or whether someone can reach a critical valve without a ladder.
Many operator screens are tag lists on gray backgrounds: rows of numbers, cryptic alarm codes, a replica of the P&ID. They show data, not meaning. The physical plant often follows suit: instruments mounted wherever the piping allowed, valves hidden behind other equipment, labels faded and never replaced.
We'd never accept a car dashboard that needed a 30-year veteran to read it. We accept it in treatment plants every day.
What UI/UX Means, And Why Water Should Care
There is a name for the discipline that fixes this, and it is worth learning. UI stands for user interface: everything an operator sees and touches, from screens and buttons to labels, gauges, and physical controls. UX stands for user experience: how the whole interaction works in practice. How quickly can someone understand what's happening, and how easily can they recover from a mistake?
Together, UI/UX is the practice of designing systems around how people actually use them. It is standard in consumer technology, cars, aviation, and medical devices, and still largely unfamiliar in water treatment.
The term isn't going anywhere, and water should adopt it. A well-designed system carries knowledge that would otherwise live only in an operator's memory. It also gets new hires working on their own sooner. For anyone specifying or upgrading a system, the test is simple: does the equipment tell the operator what's wrong, where, and what to do next?
What A Simpler System Looks Like
The goal is to do the interpretation once, in the design, so operators aren't redoing it every shift. In our work, that comes down to four things.
Screens that explain, not just display. An alarm that reads "PT-201 HIGH" assumes the operator knows what PT-201 is and why it matters. An alarm that names the equipment, its location, the likely cause, and the first thing to check carries that knowledge for them. The same goes for plain-language labels, fewer screens, and color used only when it means something.
A live model of the plant. Often called a digital twin, this is an on-screen model of the actual equipment that shows what each pump, valve, and tank is doing right now. A new hire can learn the plant before touching it, and an alarm can point to the exact physical spot. Small and mid-size systems, where the workforce gap hurts most, rarely have one.
Knowledge captured where it is used. Notes and logs tied to specific equipment, recording why an operator made a call, not just what changed.
Physical design built for people. Ease of use doesn't stop at the screen. Ladders and step platforms where operators actually need access, valves at reachable heights, clear labels, and sensors that report their own health all reduce what someone must know to work safely.
The head operator at a small municipal plant in Georgia that runs one of our modular treatment systems put it simply: “It’s a very self-regulating system, which is fantastic for already strained operators that have plenty on their plate.”
One of the best design tests we've seen came from my cousin, then a 10-year-old fifth grader. During wet testing at our facility, when we run a unit with water before it ships, he operated one of our systems with our engineers alongside him. Operators bring judgment that only years on the job can build, and no screen replaces that. But if a fifth grader can follow what a system is doing, a new hire can too.
The Recruiting Side
The same design problem that drains knowledge out of plants keeps young people from walking in. A generation raised on intuitive software reads a gray, decades-old operator screen as a signal: this industry is behind. Meanwhile, the companies drawing the best graduates offer modern tools and a sense of mission.
Water has the mission. What it often lacks is the outward sign that the work is modern. Membranes, smart sensors, and live data are advanced technology, but if the interface looks like 1998, nobody sees it.
So let's say it plainly: water treatment should be sexy. We shouldn't be afraid of the word. A resource this essential to life deserves at least as much design care as the phone in your pocket.
Most of our team are young engineers, many out of Georgia Tech, who chose water. We'd like the industry to give a lot more of their classmates a reason to do the same.
What Utilities Can Do Now
None of this requires replacing a plant tomorrow. Whatever equipment you run, these steps can start today.
- Turn your logs into a living manual. Years of shift logs, work orders, and alarm histories already hold much of a plant's institutional knowledge. AI tools such as ChatGPT or Claude can sort that record into plain-language onboarding guides for each department. Have senior operators review every page before it is used, and keep operational data on approved, secure systems.
- Steal from the best interfaces. In the line often attributed to Picasso, good artists copy and great artists steal. The best-designed technology most of us use is already in our pockets and driveways. Study how a smartphone or a Tesla dashboard shows only what matters, and ask why a plant can't.
- Design with empathy, down to the edge cases. Picture the newest operator on a night shift during a storm. Design every screen, alarm, and walkway for that moment, and bring operators into the design reviews.
- Treat aesthetics as function. Clean, uncluttered design reduces decision fatigue and makes problems stand out. It also shapes the mood of everyone who works in or walks past a facility. Operators spend at least 40 hours a week at the plant, often more waking hours than they spend at home, and no one wants to spend their working life somewhere dark and neglected. The common assumption is that good design costs more. In our experience, it rarely does. It comes down to smart material selection and research.
- Write usability into your specs. Ask vendors to show how a first-year operator would diagnose a common alarm. Time it.
The Knowledge Doesn't Have To Retire
The retirement wave can't be stopped. The loss of what those operators know can be. Good design respects an operator's time, and it keeps what they know from walking out the door with them. The industry has spent decades specifying what our systems must do. It's time to specify how easily people can run them.
Sources:
WWEMA Window: The Workforce Is Evolving. Is Yours?, Water Online, citing Brookings Institution retirement eligibility figures
Gulzeb Muhammadzai is Founding Chief Commercial Officer of 4Earth (4earth.tech), a Marietta, GA, technology company that designs and builds automated, modular water treatment systems for municipal and industrial use, shaped in the field with the operators who run them.