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> Having emergency braking turn off in the event of a manual brake tap is definitely a failure on Tesla's part. Yes, but the failure mode is not so easy to see
by joshuak 10y ago
> Having emergency braking turn off in the event of a manual brake tap is definitely a failure on Tesla's part.
Yes, but the failure mode is not so easy to see prior to use. It's due to how humans react to the new feature itself, not because it's a bad feature, or a misunderstanding about how users 'normally' react. User's may incorrectly anticipate a behavior (such as in this case), or they may expect the feature to fail so unnecessarily take control (cause of some airline disasters).
This is a general problem of computer human interaction. I'd say it falls under the discipline of UX design. Knowing that breaking is an automatic reaction should be a clue that it will make it a poor mechanism to understand user intent. You then know that you should be looking at other mechanisms to more accurately capture user intent.
- Perhaps the auto-breaking feature should have better defaults such err towards enabling rather than err towards disabling.
- Perhaps the control for toggling auto-breaking should not also be the breaking mechanism itself.
- Perhaps context is now relevant, and user input should be interpreted differently when auto-breaking is on and there is an immanent collision.
I think it's important to pay special attention when making any interface change to a well established user behavior, and acknowledge that new behavior leads to unstable and unreliable input. In these cases put extra effort into finding the path of least cognitive burden when the accuracy of user input is the most critical (i.e. immanent collision) even at the expense of adding cognitive burden elsewhere.
Cognitive burden is a critical consideration in all system design from airplanes to cell phones, but tragically is often overlooked.
- rdtsc 10y ago> It's due to how humans react to the new feature itself, not because it's a bad feature, or a misunderstanding about how users 'normally' react. It is not easy but it should be done. Keeping a car steadily between lanes is not easy either, or take self driving cars that is hard. Besides, research into some of this has already been done with aircraft and pilots. > It's due to how humans react to the new feature itself, not because it's a bad feature, or a misunderstanding about how users 'normally' react. It is a bad feature. Feature doesn't exist in a void, it exists only because humans are using it. "Human presses the brakes, what to do next?" is a feature with a human in the loop. > Cognitive burden is a critical consideration in all system design from airplanes to cell phones, but tragically is often overlooked. Exactly. Moreover "mode confusion" (human not understanding what mode the aircraft autopilots or other systems are in, and then reacting assuming a different mode) is a common cause of crashes. There were tools and studies specifically geared towards mode confusion: http://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/fm/fm-now-mode-confusion.html http://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/fm/fm-now-mode-confusion.html Asiana 214 is a recent example of pilot assuming the autothrottle was on, but it wasn't, so plane crashed. It is a bit like here, the user assumed Tesla would slow down some but then stay in the automatic mode.
- bobwaycott 10y agoI believe you mean auto-braking, not auto-breaking, in all the instances you used the term, right? That is, we want the vehicle to brake, but not break.
- joshuak 10y agoSo you're saying my subliminal messaging was too obvious? ;)