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How the design of a WWII plane led to the concept of user friendliness (2019)
- fouc 6y agoTL;DR: It didn't. Some guy realized customizing pilot cockpits would save lives. User Friendliness was thus discovered.
- mc32 6y agoThe connection is not tenuous. Basically as you say planes were designed to be user friendly --vs insisting on the user/pilot becoming an expert. New recruits were given comparatively little training before going on missions. That same viewpoint was implemented in Macs where the computer accommodated the user rather than have a new user get to know arcane systems.
- scorxn 6y ago"The reason why all those pilots were crashing when their B-17s were easing into a landing was that the flaps and landing gear controls looked exactly the same. The pilots were simply reaching for the landing gear, thinking they were ready to land. And instead, they were pulling the wing flaps, slowing their descent, and driving their planes into the ground with the landing gear still tucked in."
- 082349872349872 6y ago+"*ç% automatic cars, with their brake pedal extended to where the clutch ought to be...
- sb057 6y ago>By law, that ingenious bit of design—known as shape coding—still governs landing gear and wing flaps in every airplane today. And the underlying idea is all around you: It’s why the buttons on your videogame controller are differently shaped, with subtle texture differences so you can tell which is which. I'm not aware of any major controller that has done this outside of the GameCube controller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameCube_controller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameCube_controller
- ceejayoz 6y agoXbox controllers have large buttons, small buttons, joysticks, a D-pad, and two different triggers on the back. The A/B/X/Y aren't distinguished between each other, but I suspect the four throttles for a B-17 aren't either.
- EricE 6y ago> The A/B/X/Y aren't distinguished between each other Sure they are - their layout is distinct and doesn't alighn with any other buttons on the controller. It's very easy to distinguish which one you are hitting even though their shape and size are identical.
- zelos 6y agoThe Gamecube controller did it better, I think. Each button was a unique size, shape and colour.
- jmchuster 6y agoThere's an interesting series on youtube where a gamer has his non-gamer girlfriend play through a bunch of games on her own, and one of the common patterns is that she has no idea where the buttons are, has to constantly look at the controller, is always pressing the wrong ones. The only game that actually solved this for her was the Legend of Zelda, which has prompts that show all four buttons ABXY outlined on the screen, arranged visually like they are on the controller, and then highlights the one you need to press.
- roywiggins 6y agoThe SNES controller has concave XY buttons (and convex AB buttons).
- moring 6y agoThis confused me, but there seems to be a difference between US and JP/EU SNES devices. The buttons are only concave for US, and they are in shades of blue instead of different colors.
- userbinator 6y agoIt’s why the dials and knobs in your car are all slightly different, depending on what they do. This has become a real problem with newer cars where everything has been replaced by a touchscreen.
- DomenicoMazza 6y agoTouchscreens have their place but not to replace controls you can activate by feel alone and access with less distraction.
- dhsysusbsjsi 6y agoThis. Even to the point that I swear people designing cars don’t factor in 100% tactile any more. For example my Skoda has a full 360 degree knob for changing aircon vent position with no detents. There is literally no way of changing from defog to face without looking down and adjusting. My Mazda on the other hand is more mechanical which may at first seem “clunkier”, but it has stops on either end for face (fat counter clockwise) and defog (full clockwise) so you can instantly choose the most common settings. The in-between settings have large and small detents as you cycle through so I can go 50% feet, 50% defog by going hard right then one click back without looking.
- wwweston 6y agoTouchscreens are modern. (Not meant as affirmation of touchscreens especially in an auto context, meant to provoke reflection about the term "modern".)
- DomenicoMazza 6y agoPaul Fitts mentioned in the article came up with Fitts’ Law to describe selection difficulty as a relationship between target size and distance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law While reading I had a feeling Fitts was well known for something!
- throwaway0a5e 6y agopfft. The concept of "user friendliness" dates back a lot longer in ww2. During the industrial revolution industry went on a binge of making things more "user friendly" because it reduced human error and reduced downtime spent fixing machines and hosing former workers out of them. This is why, for example, on a lathe you traditionally have different shaped Z and X handles. It prevents you from crashing the machine by having your hand on the wrong handle when you go to make a rough adjustment. A bored journalist could write the same article about user friendliness in the early industrial workplace, it would just be harder because there's no one big story to base your article around and the sources are harder to find.
- EricE 6y agoYes, a lot of that article was navel gazing at how smart we are today. None of these problems are new nor are the solutions discussed about novel. But they do need to be repeated, because they are not always obvious. I dunno why so many articles/books like these have to come off so "preachy"; ironically that in itself is not very user friendly.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- RachelF 6y agoYeah - the article is well written, but junk and full of hyperbole like: "He saw, instead, the impossibility of flying these planes at all." Really! B-17's completed hundreds of thousands of missions. And pilots still land modern planes "wheels up", so modern UI design has not eliminated the problem.
- michaelt 6y agoTo be fair, the few times I've sat in the cockpit of a plane I've said to myself "good lord, one person has to keep on top of all these dials and controls" - six dials in a glider that doesn't even have an engine? Fifteen in a small plane for non-professional pilots? To say nothing of the cockpits of commercial airliners and fighter jets. And presumably every one of those dials corresponds to something important the pilot has to be monitoring and controlling. There aren't many vehicles with an interface that complex.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago> some of the most advanced computers ever made now come with only cursory instructions that say little more than "turn it on." This is one of the great achievements of the last century of technological progress. Also the greatest contribution towards reduced curiosity, inquisitiveness, and the hacker ethos.
- 236dev 6y ago>Fortress rolled off the drawing board and onto the runway in a mere 12 months Now that's something you don't see these days! I wonder what has slowed development so much, is it more complexity? It seems like a B-17 would be considered extremely complex in 1940.
- jeromescuggs 6y agoby 1940 it was already 4 years old :P in terms of development i assume this refers to the field of aircraft design, and i think it might not be obvious at first how dizzyingly complex modern aircraft can get. aerodynamics is already a complicated thing, but then you have to design around stealthiness. since your goal is both, physically operating such a vehicle would be almost impossible because of instability issues, so you now have to design software that will smooth out the aircraft as it flies, while still allowing the pilot to do exactly what they want, when they need to. now you have to find parts that will allow all of that to come together - powerplant, materials, etc - for example, even the paint for stealth aircraft had to be developed to help reduce radar signature, etc etc etc
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoMore complexity, more rules (especially when it comes to aircraft!), less pressure (the countries under attack in WW2 had to innovate or perish), etc. I'm sure you can design and build a plane within a year nowadays, but unlike at that time, there's not really a need. But yeah, fast design + construction is still a thing; think startup hackathons / POCs, 24-hour game jams, prefab high-rise buildings, Coronavirus vaccines, etc.
- WalterBright 6y agoThere's a similar story with warning horns on aircraft. I think the first warning horn added was a stall warning. It worked great. So they added more horns with different sounds, one after another. Eventually, it turns out that pilots got confused as to which horn meant what. Something had to be done! The solution was ridiculously obvious - the horn sounds were speech saying what is wrong, like "stall! stall!" instead of "toot! toot!". I think about that whenever I deal with a piece of machinery that emits random beeps to warn me about something. Like my car. Really, how hard is it to say "ya left ya lights on, ya fakking slagger!" so I would know what to do. At least my navigator says "recalculating" when I screw up, although I prefer "ya shoulda turned back yonder, ya witless wanker!" Though I do wonder why they never put me in charge of the warning horn design.
- dmckeon 6y agoA similar confusion may be audible in any McDonalds. Their kitchens have many alerts and alarms, and many of them use the same tone. Get a beverage, stand with a view behind the counter toward the kitchen, wait, and listen.
- WalterBright 6y agoBack in the 80's people would make intelligible speech simply by connecting a speaker to a 5V 1-bit I/O port. So there's no excuse from a cost standpoint.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoPeople seem to be afraid of treating their people like idiots; when it comes to airplanes, you cannot be ambiguous when it comes to emergency / unexpected situations. With cars, I've had the privilege of driving cars with automatic lights for a while now, I don't have to think about it anymore. On older cars, my dad used to fiddle with the wiring a bit and install an alarm if he turned the engine off or opened the door with the lights still on. That was just the one alarm though.
- supernova87a 6y agoThe most chilling/disturbing thing you read in the transcripts of plane crashes is some statement or similar that "the crew had never previously heard this audible warning".
- scarier 6y agoThis is a perennial problem in aviation. One of my favorite examples relates to flaws in our assumptions about anthropometrics: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
- moring 6y agoWhile that article shows how too little configuration towards the individual user leads to problems, there is a balance to find. In the software world, we are often facing the opposite problem: Being overwhelmed by too many configuration parameters, ironically leading to the same outcome because the user is unable to configure the system at all. This is especially frustrating when many of those parameters are not even adjusting the software to the individual but are arbitrary free parameters like "in which folder do you want the software to place its internal data files", or are about adjusting one piece of software to another so they work together -- problems that should be solved by the manufacturer without needing user input. On an orthogonal note, I smiled when I read this paragraph about excuses from the manufacturers: > When airplane manufacturers first heard this new mandate, they balked, insisting it would be too expensive and take years to solve the relevant engineering problems. But the military refused to budge, and then — to everyone’s surprise — aeronautical engineers rather quickly came up with solutions that were both cheap and easy to implement. They designed adjustable seats, technology now standard in all automobiles. They created adjustable foot pedals. They developed adjustable helmet straps and flight suits.
- gridspy 6y agoRead: https://humanisticsystems.com/2018/02/25/human-factors-and-ergonomics-looking-back-to-look-forward/ https://humanisticsystems.com/2018/02/25/human-factors-and-e... If you wanted more on HOW they fixed the bomber. That part was fascinating.
- supernova87a 6y agoI don't know where to find this on the web, but I saved this favorite story about why the MD-11 was such an ill-fated plane. Now re-reading it, brings to mind the 737 MAX, no? ----------- The MD-11 had a whole range of issues that added up to a poor design. McDD did the development of the MD-11 on the cheap, led by their illustrious leader HS who did everything for minimum cost. It really needed a clean sheet design wing rather than just adapting the DC-10 one (which had never been got right in the first place and had excessive drag). But the money was not provided to do this. Madcap idea was to reduce the size of the horizontal stabiliser (the "tail") compared to the DC-10 (despite the greater size), to reduce its drag. That makes it more difficult to control. To then overcome this a computer called the Longitudinal Stability Augmentation System was devised. We're speaking about 25-30 year old computer technology here. This was meant to enhance the way the tailplane worked. Another was that MD-11 pilots were to receive "additional training", that euphemism for handling something difficult and not intuitive. Various outcomes ensued, particularly on landing. One is the MD-11 got the universal nickname of "The Scud" in the pilot world because "you never know where it's going to land" (remember the MD-11 came into service at the time of the first Gulf War). Hence the "additional training" which concentrates on landing aspects. The second was its propensity to then drag a wing in landings that became unstable. This revealed a further poor (and cheap) piece of wing design, as the wing will tend to break at the attachment, which then leads to the aircraft cartwheeling on touchdown. For a type where only 200 were built, the number which have been destroyed in these cartwheeling accidents (which have never once happened to their Boeing or Airbus rivals) is just unacceptable. Now the MD-11 had other poor aspects. It didn't meet its performance guarantees, which allowed a number who ordered it to walk away from it. The Pratt & Whitney engined version in particular were unreliable. But more than anything else Boeing came up with an aircraft of remarkably similar size which used just two engines, not three, and yet delivered not only equal performance but everything the MD-11 had claimed to do but didn't. Boeing spent the R&D money on the 777, and got their return. The worth of the MD-11 didn't quite fall to scrap value, however, as the three-engined approach made it suitable for those who move high weight a medium distance - the cargo airlines. And so FedEx, UPS, and some others would pay reasonable secondhand prices for them. The original buyers thus sold them off, and bought 777s instead. Yes, there were a range of reasons. But in the background, quietly, the Chief Pilot is telling the Chairman of the Board "that thing is an accident waiting to happen for us". As, I regret to say, the cargo airlines continue to find out. I suspect the airline's insurers had something to say as well. McDD just didn't get their Return on Investment, and the same thing happened with the MD90 and MD95, two more adaptations done on the cheap. Out of cash, they had to be absorbed by Boeing, and their vast assembly plant area in Long Beach is now condos and shopping malls. The most extraordinary part about this is that HS got himself accepted and pushed up to the very top of the Boeing hierarchy, where his extreme cost cutting some years ago did the same again - this time going for a real all-whiz new design, new materials, plus all subcontracted out (to the low bidder of course) rather than use the traditional workforce, etc,etc. Everything different, all at once. Roll on several years from his time there, and we all know what's happened to that new Boeing type, don't we ...... ? As was said 20-30 years ago : "The best aircraft would be - designed by Lockheed, built by Boeing, sales & markeing team from McDonnell Douglas". Notable which of the three skills eventually came out on top.
- FearNotDaniel 6y agoThankfully, the interface designers for cars and planes don't break into your garage/hangar in the middle of the night and move the controls around, change their colour and shape, or rearrange the entire control panel without giving you any warning or choice. App and web designers are quite keen on doing this. Imagine if a Boeing pilot stepped into the cockpit one day and found it had suddenly been reconfigured to look like an Airbus. Apps like MS Office have orders-of-magnitude more users than airliners, and yet they don't bat an eyelid when suddenly moving everyday functions to different parts of the screen.