I beg your pardon? Are you saying the Agilent E3631A is about to get an upgrade with more bells and whistles? Well, admittedly it has only been on the market since the nineties, so I guess it is due for an overhaul. Which crucial features do you believe needs to be added, or how should its user interface be changed, compared to the Rigol DP832 ?
Displaying the values for all channels at the same time.
Right, this is what is happening as display technology advances and as software becomes more familiar to both product designers and users.
When you have a one line display with a relatively limited amount of segment-based characters the product designer decides if the user should first see actual volts and actual amps or maybe set volts and set amps, but either way the user can can toggle between actual volts and actual amps to set volts and set amps, etc. When you get bigger displays you gain enough room for actual volts, actual amps, set volts, and set amps to all be displayed simultaneously. And that's for channel 1; if you have a 2nd channel maybe you have to hit a button and toggle some more.
As an example of the limitations and trade-offs forced by conventional segment-character displays you get (I realize these are electronic loads vs. a power supply) the BK 8500 vs. the Manyuo 9712. The BK shows volts and amps on one display, hit toggle and you can see ohms and watts. On the Maynuo you can see all four (volts, amps, ohms, watts) at the same time - which is nice if you want to watch some of the values drive the other values.
The next step up from adding more segmented characters per line and more lines per display is your basic LCD technology that descends from computer monitors and TVs. Now you can have bigger displays that present more information and no longer are you limited to alphanumerics and a few special characters. You can get graphs or potentially pixel-based images of almost of anything. No doubt, those resistant to change will say "well, I used to use a slide rule and I can do all the calculations in my head even without the slide rule - and anything more than the basics (whatever those familiar values might be) will defocus me from my mission", or something like that. For those people there could be a user option to display just the basics - whatever those might be. In a really well designed user interface such preferences (such as just "the basics" or extra large characters for viewing from across the lab, or whatever a user wants - within some reasonable confines) could potentially be designated user by user or lab by lab (if you wanted to standardize in a workgroup.)
We are now crossing over from what Agilent (and others) made so well recognized, understood, respected, and trusted to new ways of displaying information. Some people will prefer the old way/basics and others will prefer more information rich approaches.
My opinion is that the new technology and the additional information it can surface is potentially very desireable and I predict new user interfaces will evolve and some new version of the new way will become the new norm (even if it takes a few users kicking and screaming with it). BUT, and this is a big BUT, all of this display and user interface stuff is close to worthless (or worse than worseless) if it isn't backed up by reliable signal acquisition and processing. The data must be accurate to within published specs so that users can rely on the data acquired and presented whether they get it by visualizing a single monochrome character at a time as it scrolls by like an old stock ticker symbol display or by watching it in 3D color holographics. AND further, and this is a BIG AND, neither the user interface or the integrity of the signal and the resulting displayed information is of any value if the test equipment doesn't protect the DUT and the user. The first job of test equipment (used responsibly) is to DO NO HARM.
So, in ascending order (from #3/third most important to #1/most important), we get:
3. New displays and user interfaces are on the way - we should find a way to embrace and continually improve them.
2. More important than the display/UI (which is very important) is signal aquisition and processing integrity.
1. More important than 1 or 2 is that test equipment should do no harm to a responsible user or the user's DUT.