14 ms·

The U.S. Navy's $100M checkbox (2019)

291 points by davidbarker 2y ago

figassis 2y ago
This seems to me like. a case of "hindsight is 20/20". There were thousands of design decisions made in the ship's controls, and likely multiple of them can in certain, yet untested scenarios, cause a disaster. Has he identified those as well? And isn't more training and experience also an effective way to handle more of these possible scenarios?
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Training is good, but it's not like design (I mean in how it should be used, not looks) is something which should be ignored. If you have a bad design, you need an awful lot of training to compensate for that. The incident report almost didn't mention design at all, so what are the chances of the problems ever getting addressed?
  - stackskipton 2y ago
    >The incident report almost didn't mention design at all, so what are the chances of the problems ever getting addressed? The fact the Touch Screen shouldn't have been there? Almost zero. EDIT: Apparently the Navy is going to put all mechanical controls back. I was totally wrong. My guess is a bunch of retired flag officers at some defense contractor pitched it and close to retirement flag officers approved it. Maybe in 10 years, they will quietly change it behind closed doors but more than likely, someone has great idea of using Vision Pro to control everything because Heads Up Display or some insane thing they can sell to Navy for big money.
- account42 2y ago
  If making the primary propulsion some ad-hoc touchscreen control instead of a physical lever is only something you can get to with hindsight then you shouldn't even be anywhere near to a position where you can make that mistake.
  - figassis 2y ago
    The point is that this was likely only one of many poor design decisions that were and will keep being made. I get touch screens are universally bad for operating vehicles or any other machine that requires attention, muscle memory and quick response times, but, if another disaster happens tomorrow for some other design issue not related to touch screens, will he then write another post about how that was the main issue? Because it's not the main issue. The crew where unaware of the physics of the controls. Would this not have happened with physical controls? It seems it is not immediately obvious at any time how much steering is being caused by the propellers or the rudder. Having 2 physical levers positioned differently would not make it more obvious to someone already unaware of this. They woud likely not look for the Gang button even if it were a giant red button. Now if the gang feature were designed (physically or digitally) to always snap back to locked unless some constant pressure is applied (like a spring), maybe this would be imprinted into every crew member.
    - pdonis 2y ago
      > Having 2 physical levers positioned differently would not make it more obvious to someone already unaware of this. Yes, it would, because it's so much easier to see. Remember that everybody on that bridge, which includes the Captain and the Officer of the Deck, was unaware of how the throttles were set. Two physical levers would have made it obvious to those people, and they could then have issued the right commands to fix it.
      - jeroenhd 2y ago
        I think making essential controls touch screen based is stupid for a variety of reasons, but I don't think physical levers would've changed the situation. Airplanes have crashed because pilots misinterpreted physical levers, switches, displays, and lights. There have been accidents where a (co)pilot was confused by the lack of power they themselves were physically applying with their hands. You can add synchronised force-feedback levers to every station, but that doesn't matter if your crew is too sleep-deprived to understand what those levers mean anyway. Not understanding the UI was only a small part in a huge shit show of problems that plagued the ship, and it was hardly the first time this sort of thing happened on that particular ship either.
pta2002 2y ago
This website is completely unreadable on an ultrawide monitor, it seems to make the font size dependent on the window's width, which makes it absolutely massive (I can maybe fit half a paragraph on the screen?), and the browser zoom does not seem to change the font size because of it...
- DrScientist 2y ago
  Ironic
- alt227 2y ago
  > the browser zoom does not seem to change the font size because of it This is one of the worst cases of this I have seen. It is literally unreadable for me. Normally I can use browser zoom to sort it out, but this beauty even defeats that workaround.
  - rmarques7 2y ago
    The irony of this happening on an article talking about bad design...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - hgomersall 2y ago
      It's not ironic; it just demonstrates that design is hard to get right.
      - kmoser 2y ago
        It's not hard to design a web page that's 95% text and which lets the user adjust the font size via the browser's zoom controls.
  - tapland 2y ago
    Yup, but while making the window smaller to write this I noticed I can make it a small window, about the size of my phone, to get text that is reasonable. The site, giving UI advice, is written assuming your display is always ~7" ?
junaru 2y ago
> Two years ago a Navy destroyer was ripped open by the nose of a Liberian tanker. Ten sailors were crushed or drowned as their sleeping quarters filled with water after the collision. At the heart of the tragedy is a single checkbox on a touchscreen. No, this is crew incompetence, the checkbox is just covering the fact the crew has no idea how the vehicle works or how to operate it. > The crew believed they had lost control of the ship because they were relying on the main steering controls, the rudder, without realizing that the ship was turning because of the secondary steering method, propellors set at different speeds Let that sink in (no pun intended) - the crew is not aware the propellors can spin at different speeds... for three minutes... with what appears to be two giant sliders on the screen.
- Prickle 2y ago
  Not to forget, the same problem has happened before with aircraft pilots. Someone doesn't notice that the the wrong engines are running, or someone forgot to power down one of the engines. Or there was an engine failure. And in the confusion, someone powers down the wrong engines. Usually in these cases, fatigue or information overload is a major factor. The pilots were fully qualified. They were simply overworked, and too tired to realize their mistake. I wouldn't assign all the blame to lack of training. The navy is very famously overworked and understaffed, and not just in the USA.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    The air industry is very good at blame-less post-mortems and finding root causes. I think the Navy could benefit from some things from their playbook. I think one major contributing factor is that Navy ships are so bespoke compared to airliners.
    - sgarland 2y ago
      The Nuclear Navy is also excellent at post-mortems (though they’re called critiques – it is still quite possible and reasonable to blame someone if indeed it was personnel failure) and finding root causes. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the conventional fleet did things completely differently.
maxglute 2y ago
>We create rules enforcing mandatory sleep requirements stupidly believing that we can eliminate the potential for a user of the system to be drowsy while at the controls. >stupidly believing Dick move by author to reveal his level of ignorance of USN operation tempo around McCain collision until the last few paragraphs. There were lol 4 fucking surface ship collisions and a grounding in westpac in 2017 because sailors were ran ragged, leading to operation pause. UX wasn't the primary problem. Sailors weren't "drowsy", they were sleep deprived, hopped up on stimulants etc due to manning shortages and long deployments, and likely lax training (due to shortages), which caused USS Connecticut accident a few years later. I'm sure you can improve UI for audience subsisting on 3-5 hours of sleep, but maybe the more pressing thing to try is to get them more sleep. IIRC there was study on navy sleep hyigene and like 100% of sailors in bottom quartile experienced bewilderment/confusion. https://news.usni.org/2017/09/18/admiral-captain-removed-part-investigation-uss-john-s-mccain-uss-fitzgerald-collisions-head-surface-forces-puts-early-retirement-request https://news.usni.org/2017/09/18/admiral-captain-removed-par...
- moconnor 2y ago
  Ignorance is not a “dick move”, it’s having something to learn. The extreme sleep deprivation doesn’t really conflict with the author’s point that better UI could have avoided this. Better sleep could have too.
  - DSingularity 2y ago
    Certainly true but I think he is saying that the author should have indicated his limited knowledge of the context of the collision early on in the article.
    - maxglute 2y ago
      Yes, I'm being overly uncharitable, but it takes very inept research to study Mccain accident and not be exposed to the other 3 accidents, or be generally aware of the state of 7th fleet / condition of sailors from any of the reports. 4 major accidents do not happen in that specific fleet (out of 7) because of UXUI, when the other 6 fleets operate the same ships. Extra side eye of commentary/conclusion reducing cripplingly bad culture around sleep to "drowsiness" because elevating UXUI / blaming checkbox works less well when operators are mentally not there. You don't UXUI truckers so they can drive safely on a few hours of sleep, you regulate how long they can drive to make sure they get enough sleep.
firesteelrain 2y ago
The checkbox isn’t the “smoking gun” but rather part of a broader range of system issues in design and usability that likely contributed the USS John McCain accident. Having developed these types of systems though, the UX goes through heavy HMI reviews by real users and engineers. Likely whomever built this ship had those reviews. I would like to understand if this checkbox and its related design ever came up in those reviews and whether engineers were directed by their Navy customer to change it. It’s possible it was just a small footnote on a PowerPoint slide and they moved on.
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  I think this is the actual wtf, along with the transfer ui: > The transfer of thrust comes with an additional level of complexity because the propellors must be transferred one at a time. Half way through a transfer the boat is in a situation where one propellor is controlled by one station and the other is controlled by someone else. At this moment the checkbox labeled “Gang” is automatically unchecked. Absolutely no surprise that in a moment of panic, the thrust controls end up spread across multiple stations. Why is this even a feature? Not a sailor so just armchair commenting, but in what situation would that be beneficial?
  - firesteelrain 2y ago
    From what I was able to infer this is the use case of “Splitting Thrust Control During Station Transfer” (btw I made that up just based on my reading of it. I don’t design Navy ship subsystems for a living - I work on specialized subsystems like these) The temporarily assigning control of each propeller to different stations would require the automatic deselection of a synchronization (or "Gang") function during the transfer. Why weren’t they properly trained on this? How did they get into this situation unknowingly? I would assume a provided manual by the manufacturer would have trained the Sailors on how to properly perform this function. This sounds like a more exceptional than routine use case.
    - willyt 2y ago
      I've experience of steering a twin prop 50 tonne SAR vessel so quite a bit smaller than this but still same principles. We also have strict procedures for transferring command of the helm between different stations. There is never a situation where you would want the throttles for each prop split between command stations. There is almost never a situation where you would want the throttle controls at a different station than the helm (the person steering). The throttles and the rudder interact a lot and in any close quarters manoeuvring situation you want helm and throttles all under the control of one person.
netsharc 2y ago
Meta: irony is talking about bad UI, on a webpage where the typeface is just too damn big for a 1080p desktop screen, and using the browser's zoom out function doesn't do anything because of some "clever" CSS for the font-size.
- f1shy 2y ago
  I was going to say the same. Have seen similar comments below… Real irony!
  - netsharc 2y ago
    Ah, I skimmed through the comments and didn't see anything mentioning it. I must've skimmed way too fast!
    - pjc50 2y ago
      HN always comments on bad web page design, to the extent of detracting from the content.
      - teddyh 2y ago
        Bad web page design already detracts from the content. Complaints about bad web design are attempts to resurrect the content.
- bheadmaster 2y ago
  For anyone reading this, if you want to remove this "clever" CSS font-size, here's the option you need to disable in Inspect Element screen: :root { font-size: calc(1vw + 1vh + .5vmin); } It is bound to the <html> tag itself, so there's no need for element hunting.
- mdavid626 2y ago
  Why the hell would you do that? Makes no sense at all.
- 2y ago
zweifuss 2y ago
While I agree with most of the assessment, I think that checkbox is fine. Removing the set of motorized haptic control levers and the motorized steering wheel at the brigde is a problem. Had the designers needed to integrate the feedback forces, they could have visualized them on the gui only stations too.
pjc50 2y ago
The traditional engine order telegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_order_telegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_order_telegraph is a beautiful piece of mechanical design. A more modern version would be aircraft-style throttle handles, which are also placed close together so that you naturally move two or four of them together with one hand movement. Reducing that to a checkbox just seems .. inadequate.
- VBprogrammer 2y ago
  Similar controls are used on modern ships. They usually though have an option to control both engines with one throttle to avoid having to manually synchronise the speed of both. Not sure if they have a reversion to separate control if someone grabs the currently redundant lever.
- sgarland 2y ago
  As Wikipedia states, nuclear vessels still have EOTs, though they’ve evolved. On Virginia-class subs, the EOT has been made into a linear button array. It’s arranged in logical order (All Ahead Flank at top, descending to All Stop, then down to All Back Emergency; there are small gaps in between Ahead, Stop, and Back groups), and the button flashes when an order is received. There’s also an audible alert, of course. The throttles themselves are small hand wheels, with the astern wheel being smaller and offset from the ahead wheel. These send redundant signals to the main engine controllers (which also redundant), which ultimately control the main engines. In the event of an emergency, there is a manual override station between the main engines – this is outside of maneuvering, and would require a different watchstander to man, since the propulsion plant operator is also running the reactor. To your main point though, yes, a checkbox is inadequate. Physical controls are generally superior, which is why car manufacturers who moved away from them are starting to move back.
  - bfrink 2y ago
    This (seemingly elegant) Virginia-class implementation feels like an inheritance of the Rickover and SUBSAFE philosophy. Not sure how the surface Navy would accept anything less.
jmyeet 2y ago
That's a really good write-up. To summarize, the checkbox in question was designed such that it's lit up when checked and not when it isn't. I'm surprised they did this because it's terrible design. You see this all over the place. It confuses the user who thinks there should be a check there and can't tell if it's checked or not checked merely by glancing at it. I was happy to see this: > The Navy recently announced they are abandoning touchscreens in their fleet in favor of physical controls. The author defends touch controls and the decision being based on really old standards and one survey (apparently). I'm going to respectfully disagree. I'm no ship captain but I believe the propeller controls on a ship are traditionally like the levers on the right of this image [1]. This is from a multi-propeller cruise ship, I believe. Now if you had those controls, anyone could tell at a glance that the propellers weren't synchronized. Touchscreens allow for UI updates more easily. This leads to designers being lazy. "We can fix it in an update". It necessitates training on checkboxes. Stop. Just... stop. [1]: https://www.marineinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/engine-telegraph.png.webp https://www.marineinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/eng...
- kmoser 2y ago
  I don't understand the difference. With a touch-screen, if the propellers aren't synchronized, you would see it immediately on the green bars: if you slide one and the other doesn't slide similarly, they aren't synchronized.
CodeVenturer 2y ago
[dead]
Gnarl 2y ago
Next episode: nuke control systems UI
- hypeatei 2y ago
  Hopefully there isn't dark patterns with the confirm button on that one :D
- sgarland 2y ago
  Virginia-class has lots of screens, but they aren’t touchscreens. The control panels have physical buttons and switches which are clearly labeled, logically laid out, and are extremely tactile. There is no confirmation for anything, because it’s assumed that you received verbal confirmation of your intended action before performing it. Conversely, they also have computers for some maintenance items, and those (intelligently) have confirmation screens everywhere, because it’s just bog-standard Windows UI. The software UI team really should talk to the control panel UI team.
- arethuza 2y ago
  Write instructions for use of your countries nukes on handwritten letters in sealed envelopes and put one copy in each submarine!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ghufran_syed 2y ago
I have no experience in ship-handling, but my naive question for this who do is: What is the rationale for being able to independently transfer control of different aspects of ‘steering’ (prop1, prop2, rudder) to different stations? . The coordination required between two or more stations inherently makes the task (control of heading and thrust) more difficult than if a single station was coordinating the process inside one brain. Is there some benefit I am not seeing that justifies the increased complexity?
- VBprogrammer 2y ago
  I'm not a mariner but from what I've seen on boats and motoryachts the controls are typically transferred with the engines in neutral. This step ensures that the person who takes control positively knows the state of the engines and avoids having to do some kind of synchronisation with the current state. Perhaps this is problem on a destroyer or they imagined the controls being routinely moved around the bridge. On most vessels it's in the same place for the whole passage and for docking or departure you chose which station to use. Idling the engines for a minute while you have isn't an imposition as anyone prudent would be doing propulsion and steering tests before entering a confined area at that point anyway. I can only think the imagined the controls being passed about on a regular basis and because they didn't need to synchronise the physical position with the current state they skipped that step. Why transferring one engine at a time made sense I have no idea.
  - kmoser 2y ago
    It seems to me that the checkbox, and even the UI, is the least of the issues. Even with the most intuitive manual controls, this problem still could have easily happened simply because the transfer of control from one station to another is fraught with potential misunderstanding of what state the different parts of the ship are in (rudder, engines, etc.) and who has control of each at any given time. Lack of sleep will exacerbate it tremendously. More training will only help so much; I'm guessing, they probably already train on this a lot. My armchair assessment is that these ships should be controlled 99% by computer, which decides the best combination of thrust, rudder, etc. to move the ship where the navigator directs it (whether by joystick to indicate direction, or touch-screen to indicate where on the map you want the ship to go, as well as what speed), and the individual controls (engines, rudder, etc.) should only be overridden in the most dire of circumstances. I'm sure there's much more to it than that, but the general idea remains the same: this is too complicated to be left to humans, whose time is better spent thinking about other parts of the mission.
moring 2y ago
It is not only the ship's UI that lacks review in the post-mortem analysis, but also the process that lead to it. "Conspicuously absent from their recommendations was any discussion about user interface design." _Why_ did the NTSB not review the user interface? What is their motivation, and the forces that influence their actions? Is the NTSB sufficiently staffed with experts on user interfaces? If not, why not? > These specifications come from a document written in 1988. Is the process to update Standard F1166 sufficient? (Probably not.) Why? Why is a document that is clearly outdated used to guide UI design in a newly designed ship? What are the incentives and forces that lead to this outdated standard being used, and no update fixing it? Related: CAST handbook, http://sunnyday.mit.edu/CAST-Handbook.pdf http://sunnyday.mit.edu/CAST-Handbook.pdf
- stackskipton 2y ago
  NTSB has zero jurisdiction here. This happened in International Waters between US Military and Liberian Flagged ship.
pdonis 2y ago
Hm. Someone whose entire article is about bad UI design makes it impossible for me to make the way-too-large fonts on the page smaller by using the controls my browser has specifically for that purpose. I haven't even read the article yet and I'm already skeptical about this author.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  It looks like this is a known issue with his handcrafted CMS: https://github.com/adrian3/whisper/issues/5 https://github.com/adrian3/whisper/issues/5
  - pdonis 2y ago
    So whisper is 6 years old and this supposed UI expert never noticed this issue? Or, for that matter, never considered that maybe trying to dynamically calculate font size--instead of just using standard CSS sizes like, oh, I dunno, "100%" or "medium", which are specifically intended to present the best font size for the user taking into account their device's configuration--wasn't a good idea?
- riknos314 2y ago
  I literally gave up on trying to read the article because of this. The eyestrain from the font size nearly immediately gave me a headache.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
knodi123 2y ago
Anybody have a non-paywalled link? I'm not making a monthly membership so I can keep reading past the 2nd paragraph...
renewiltord 2y ago
The problem was that these guys didn't have any sleep. Lots of people think like they're against Sicilians When Death Is On The Line and that if they just slow poison their folks they'll become immune to poison. Well, just like giving your children small amounts of mercury every day doesn't turn them into a mercury-immune kid, not letting people sleep doesn't lead to sleep immune people. It just transforms people into idiots. So they transformed all their people into idiots. And then the idiots crashed the boat. If you did the same to me, I assure you I would be even stupider and my performance even more lacking.
- yamazakiwi 2y ago
  I was on that ship but left before the accident, I'm pretty positive it was sleep deprivation. The schedule changed at sea frequently so you couldn't get used to what little sleep pattern you were getting. We also had surprise drills that can happen literally any time of day or night. Longest I stayed awake was 72 hours straight.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Now imagine what happens to you when you get a doctor in the second half of his shift.
jfoutz 2y ago
I tried for a long time to use this keyboard effectively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks but I never really could. I like the touchscreen idea, your user interface is the user interface you were trained on, Star Trek style. I think light and sound engineers probably have the best setup. everything's hooked up to a big board with sliders. you can physically move the sliders, and the position of the slider represents what's actually happening. But you can also set up a scene on an attached computer. Click the button, or tap the touch screen, all the sliders move to the predesignated state. I don't know a damn thing about battleships, or destroyers. But a big ass console, with physical knobs and sliders that represent the current state seems like a really good idea. Sure, you can adjust whatever from whatever glass station you want. But everyone can tell at a glance, the state of the world. You can walk over and turn the knob, overriding everything else. And everybody can see you do it, and hopefully understand what that action means. The closest I get to that sort of stuff is my car. The hazard lights are one big dedicated button. There may be a way to turn them on with the touchscreen, I don't know. Volume has a physical dial on the console. There are buttons on the steering wheel, but I find myself reaching for the dial when I really need to turn the volume down. Physical controls are expensive. I imagine there's stuff that's common and essential, that, it's probably a good idea to spend the money and have the control. I have strong feelings about this. There are little fiddly settings that you can tuck away under five layers of menus. But there's other stuff That you touch all the time, or you need in an emergency, that IMHO, you should be allowed to build up muscle memory to accomplish.
karaterobot 2y ago
> When a physical control is replaced by a digital interface, it is the job of a designer to translate the functions of the controls into pixels. If designed well the UI is intuitive. When designed poorly, the interface is difficult to understand and causes users to make mistakes. Ugh. I don't want to quote all 25 of the things I disagree with about this article, so here's the first one that came up. A well-designed UI is not necessarily intuitive. Think about vi, or the command line, or Blender, or Figma, or pretty much any UI designed for experts who spend every day using the system. These UIs trade intuitiveness and simplicity for power and speed. They do so knowingly. It's not actually desirable to make a UI intuitive—which is to say, to make it behave the way a naive user would expect the first time they use it. Not if you can instead make it more powerful, and train the users how to use it instead. An intuitive submarine control might have buttons to go up and down, left and right, and turn, and then a big red button that says "launch torpedo", like in video games. But I bet that's a bad UI for a real submarine. Instead you want it to have a lot of information on the screen, and hundreds of different functions it can perform if only you've gone through an intense training program to learn how to operate it, which is what the Navy does. I don't think that being difficult to understand and prone to making mistakes is the opposite of intuitive, either. I think those are orthogonal. None of this is to excuse the design of that system, which I've never used, and can't defend or attack. It's just I know that this is a hard problem that you can't get around by saying "just design it better".
- disillusioned 2y ago
  This is a really interesting counter-argument. The idea that the design should be dumbed down so, what, a lay-person who has never encountered the system can take over and drive the ship accurately? is an appealing one: it makes the case that, all else being equal, simplicity should win out. I would argue that there's an in-between: good design is not orthogonal to intuitive design. And I would also argue that the human factor component shouldn't be missed here, both in terms of sleep deprivation, but also in terms of being able to easily and quickly identify error states or misconfigurations at a glance, without too much cognitive overload. Cognitive overload and complex interfaces are solved with training and repetition: we do this regularly in aviation, pilotage, and all sorts of complex interfaces. But I guess it's worth asking aloud, if you can reduce some of the cognitive overload, aren't you effectively defending in depth? Sure, every complex system could be distilled to a memorized green screen incantation, and peak performance can be reached by fusing the human brain to a well-mapped, ultra-dense information-fest. But the reality of the situation is that, when training and tiredness failed these sailors, the interface further piled on _unnecessarily_. It could have been designed to be a bit more intuitive, and that might very well have saved the lives of 10 people and $223 million dollars of taxpayer money. "This is a hard problem that you can't get around by just saying 'just design it better'" sure downplays that amount of impact intuitive, clear design can have on, say, preventing the swiss cheese holes from aligning in this particular case.
benreesman 2y ago
Anyone who cares about defense procurement should support Palmer and Anduril to the extent they can.
timnetworks 2y ago
> Part I, UI Design why stop me from making text smaller on your site while coming up with headlines like this? smh
- illnewsthat 2y ago
  I know there is a HN guideline about not commenting on stuff like this, but in this case the text was so large it prevented me from wanting to read the article at all. Just uncomfortably large.
  - taspeotis 2y ago
    I have a 49" ultrawide and if I maximise the window, it is borderline unreadable. https://imgur.com/DGWQDpI https://imgur.com/DGWQDpI
jojobas 2y ago
Sounds like if it were two throttle handles with a "lock" lever below them they could fail exactly the same. It's a training/attention/fatigue issue, not a UI one.
- DangitBobby 2y ago
  If they were independent levers capable of being physically locked together, you'd probably notice when they aren't moving together. Of course, you could easily have similar visual feedback on a touch screen. Seems like the real issue is described later in the article; throttle control can be split between control stations, which is actually insane, I can't imagine a scenario where you'd want that.
  - jojobas 2y ago
    The fact that control settings were not synchronized between stations and cleared when turning over control is sure a blunder. The checkbox is not to be blamed however, it's a sane design choice. Fun fact: on some airplanes if you pull on the captain's yoke and push on the first officer's, the elevator will split, the left part doing the nose up, the right one doing nose down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990
chmorgan_ 2y ago
Very good writeup around the issue. The Navy could look to aircraft for some design guidance. There are significant market competitive forces pushing for user centric design when it comes to the interfaces of modern aircraft. They also have to deal with making new things look and work kind of like older systems, and provide interfaces that simplify information.
Animats 2y ago
Supposedly the control system has been fixed by adding physical levers, with retrofits to existing ships.[1] Unclear if they're all coupled together, so that moving a lever at one location moves all the other levers. That's a standard feature available for commercial ships. For two stations, it can be done with mechanical cables. Beyond that, there are electrical systems. This is a known cause of accidents with ship controls with multiple control stations. There was a New York City Seastreak ferry crash in 2013 due to that. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/11/20800111/us-navy-uss-john-s-mccain-crash-ntsb-report-touchscreen-mechanical-controls https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/11/20800111/us-navy-uss-john... [2] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/pages/DCA13MM005.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/pages/DCA13MM005.aspx
ajkjk 2y ago
One thing that bums me out about this is the idea that figuring this kind of thing out is what "designers" do. As if there is some special skillset and art to design that a special group of people, designers, do, which we should take seriously. No, this is just what non-idiots do. Any non-idiot would look at this UI and think: this is terrible.
- cdbyr 2y ago
  One nice thing about designers is their tie-breaking ability for non-designers. Design, being something we all think we’re right about, is easy to lose lots of time going back and forth on with non-specialists, while it’s much faster to send to a pro. But I generally agree with you, I think the world would be better if everyone was more thoughtful about this sort of thing.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    How do you justify all the bad UIs though? Is just making a decision, any decision, somehow better than making a good one?
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  Looking at the UI, I see consistently applied patterns in a pretty normalised layout. I don't know how to use any of the controls, but that's because I don't know how to steer a warship, not because the UI is bad. Had I known what "gang" means in this context, the problem would've been clear from the very first screenshot. Yes, the UI is ugly as sin, but it doesn't need to be pretty. A barely trained 18 year old on months of sleep deprivation couldn't figure this out, but that's an impossible standard to design for. The entire ship was designed to use computer aided navigation anyway, but apparently that's being disabled by default.
- moring 2y ago
  Are the people who designed this UI idiots? If no, then that contradicts your argument. Non-designers obviously do get it wrong. If yes, your argument has become a "no true scotsman" -- it no longer makes a statement about the capability of anyone, but simply defines "idiot" as people who get the UI wrong. Besides that, hindsight is 20/20. Was the UI obviously terrible before the accident happened?
Jean-Papoulos 2y ago
"Conspicuously absent from their recommendations was any discussion about user interface design. Of their seven safety recommendations, six involve training." Yes. That's because if your ship is going left and you can't figure out why when there's an interface clearly showing why (ie one engine input is higher then the other), it is a training and/or procedure issue. The author then goes on to state that during steering control transfer, the checkbox is automatically unchecked. So the engine input UI is 100% not at fault here.
- moring 2y ago
  Finding something or someone to blame -- whether it is an operator, the UI, training, whatever -- typically halts all insight-gaining processes, and is therefore not recommended. Especially if that something is "100% to blame".
- jchung 2y ago
  > 100% not at fault When something significant goes wrong, it’s almost never due to a single cause; multiple factors and confounding elements are usually at play. We build better-performing systems when we examine various contributing factors and proximal causes. The OP's argument is that the interface does not "clearly" indicate that one engine input is higher than the other. After reading the article and reviewing the interfaces, I have to say: the OP’s argument is quite compelling. While training is undoubtedly important and should be included in the safety recommendations, the OP makes a strong case that design improvements should also be considered as part of the safety recommendations.
- VBprogrammer 2y ago
  The box is only unchecked because of the curious decision to allow transferring of a single prop / engine which I'm not convinced has any real value. One thing that isn't stated is what the state of the redundant thrust slider is when the inputs are ganged together. In the physical implementations I've seen the redundant lever is usually moved to neutral and it's not inconceivable that this was carried into the digital UI. In that case failing to spot the fact that there was a differential thrust involved because of the lack of a checkbox might be much more understandable.
naruhodo 2y ago
I found the article convincing. When the throttles are ganged, there should be only one slider. When they are not ganged, there should be a visual indication of the propeller speed differential. Perhaps a horizontal bar above the throttle sliders that grows left or right according to the consequent turning moment.
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
It's hard to believe they did user testing and this design came out on top. Take a person at the end of their shift, sit then in front of a 'steering a ship' game with this UI: "with the controls set this way, which way will the ship move?" "we showed you a UI for 1s, were the props ganged? What was the differential in engine output?". Presumably the US Navy has the user testing sessions recorded and archived somewhere?
kqr 2y ago
It seems that the operator is expected to sometimes make very small adjustments to the throttle level, going by what looks like clickable arrows. I wonder why they didn't locate the UI elements corresponding to throttle indicators butting right up against each other, with a Vernier scale on them, to make misalignments quantifiable and more obvious. Not that it would have helped in this case, but maybe the scale can be magnified and change colour when there is misalignment, which would have been possibly slightly more obvious? I don't know.
edwcross 2y ago
The article mentions "ASTM International Standard F1166", and shows a few pictures and recommendations concerning check boxes. I'm very much looking for this kind of thing, for React-like interfaces, so that (1) we don't have to spend too much time thinking about this sort of details, and (2) we respect some good design principles without having been trained on it. Unfortunately, the standard in question is quite expensive and probably most of it will not be useful for web design. Is there an equivalent document/standard for websites?
ionwake 2y ago
Ill be honest I am kind of confused. Why is there sleep deprivation in the most powerful Navy in the world? I thought it wasn't run as a "the least hands for the job" type corporate culture as surely there is in essence unlimited budget. Or is this naive? Does every organisation/organism always minimise expenditure as much as possible until something sort of breaks?
sandworm101 2y ago
>> the previous sailor may have set the rudder 5 degrees right in order to compensate for wind or water current. >> In older ships, speed is basically controlled by a forward/backward joystick. Push it forward and the ship accelerates. Pull it back and the boat slows or goes in reverse. >> Most of the flaws of the touchscreens could be just one software update away. Sorry, they lost me with this. Dont lecture professionals about interfaces if you clearly do not understand the systems controlled by those interfaces. Ships are not cars. Rudders are not steering wheels. This is not a video game.
mrob 2y ago
The F1166 standard permits up to 250ms latency for touch screen response. That is ridiculously high. It practically guarantees people will think it's not working and tap again, undoing any toggle function they might have activated. They won't necessarily notice their mistake. I once accidentally ran a washing machine at 90C temperature because of high-latency touch controls. I instinctively double-pressed the touch surface to reduce temperature because I thought the first touch hadn't registered, causing it to wrap around back to maximum. It did some minor damage to the clothes before I noticed. And that was with more like 200ms latency, not 250ms. Latency on touchscreens is more important than with physical controls because there's no tactile feedback. Even 10ms is obviously imperfect for drag controls. Microsoft Research published a demonstration video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4
- kryogen1c 2y ago
  > permits up to 250ms latency for touch screen response. That is ridiculously high. It practically guarantees people will think it's not working and tap again You're saying people evaluate and react to checkbox feedback faster than 4 times/sec? I'm not a UX person so this claim seems laughable. I might believe twice that as beyond reasonable, but there is no way the average person waits less than a quarter of a second before assuming their input failed and duplicate the effort. One can hardly even observe and process that quickly - even when paying attention.
  - the__alchemist 2y ago
    250ms is significant in this context, and is a longer period than you evidently think.
    - vsuperpower2021 2y ago
      The user is either a web developer or has some neurological disorder that dulls his ability to react. There's no other explanation for not knowing how long 250 ms is.
  - mrob 2y ago
rbanffy 2y ago
It's not that touchscreens didn't exist when F1166 was written. At that time it was widely understood a touch in a touchscreen would be a click and a drag would be a mouse-down + move + mouse-up sequence. The sliders seem to be designed to be both draggable and the two buttons for precise incremental adjustments. What I find disturbing is that there doesn't seem to be a single The-Most-Important-Thing screen visible to everyone. I'd expect things like heading, steering, and engine power would be immediately available and readily visible, most important when a possible collision is identified. And I hope people realise emergency manual control is for resolving emergencies rather than creating them.
hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
Despite all other factors involved in the accident, it seems fundamentally hard to make this kind of control obvious with a touch screen. With a physical throttle control, like used in aviation [1], it's more obvious when you're pushing one side or both, as you have both vision and tactile senses to confirm position. [1] https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.y8DdQsqhqkM_iA1f8k-qcAHaEo&pid=Api https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.y8DdQsqhqkM_iA1f8k-qcAHaE...
frabjoused 2y ago
It's fascinating to me that these controls were "upgraded" to a VB-style interface in 2016.
pyrale 2y ago
This looks like an article written by a designer obsessed by how important design is, and how anyone could pilot a warship without training if designers made something perfect. It's a good reminder for software people sometimes overemphasizing the importance of software in a given situation, and how the processes encompassing it interact with it and control its outcomes.
AmazingTurtle 2y ago
regarding bad design, for this blog post: font-size: calc(1vw + 1vh + .5vmin); i can not zoom in or out, makes me go crazy
atoav 2y ago
Ganging is a term usually associated with faders on light control desks or audio mixing consoles. A typical way to indicate ganging in digital audio interfaces is by coloring the knows in the same color (usually very distinct from the rest of the interface) or by displaying a horizontal line that literally connects them. For me the astounding part here is the complete lack of visual feedback of the end result. Sure I have limited nautical experience, but from sailing I know ships are a lot about force vectors. I would have imagined a ship of that class has a clever and intuitive way of displaying the forces acting on it (and the forces applied by its various parts). This could literally be 3 horizontal bars with a 0 in the center. If the bar is filled to the left that bar makes you go left, if your bar is filled to the right, that is where it makes you go and if it is centered, you go to the center. One bar describes the resulting turning direction of both engines, one the turning direction as indicated by the rudder and one the sum of both. Sure there is then some ambiguity about what that means when you go backwards etc, but hey, one look at that would have told you "engine makes us go left".
efitz 2y ago
The article says "If you don’t have the vocabulary to describe a problem it is unlikely that you will be able to fix it." I fundamentally disagree with this. You don't need to know design jargon to identify bad design or to make good design. What you need is to understand what the user is likely to know and what you need to tell them. This is different than just providing controls, which is what most design by engineers looks like. For example, I would characterize the overall design problems with the UX as: 1. Users need to understand at a glance how each control input is currently influencing the course of the ship. Separately the users need to understand at a glance what the resultant course and position of the ship will be given the current control inputs and external factors like wind and current. 2. Users need to understand at a glance which station is controlling the ship, with intuitive controls to offer to pass control to, or accepting control from, a different station. So I can describe the problem without using any UI jargon. Similarly I can refer to these to indicate why the current UI is broken, again without UI jargon, simply by saying "it doesn't solve problem 2 because the state is unclear" or whatever.
iamleppert 2y ago
With a craft like that, there is no position hold mode? It's common in almost all autonomous or semi-autonomous systems. Basically, without input from the pilot, the craft will hold its current position. That is, let go of the input or sticks, and the thing will automatically hold its current position. Crazy to hear that such an expensive boat is basically driven by rate only controllers.

291 points by davidbarker 2y ago

This seems to me like. a case of "hindsight is 20/20". There were thousands of design decisions made in the ship's controls, and likely multiple of them can in certain, yet untested scenarios, cause a disaster. Has he identified those as well? And isn't more training and experience also an effective way to handle more of these possible scenarios?

actionfromafar 2y ago
Training is good, but it's not like design (I mean in how it should be used, not looks) is something which should be ignored. If you have a bad design, you need an awful lot of training to compensate for that. The incident report almost didn't mention design at all, so what are the chances of the problems ever getting addressed?
- stackskipton 2y ago
  >The incident report almost didn't mention design at all, so what are the chances of the problems ever getting addressed? The fact the Touch Screen shouldn't have been there? Almost zero. EDIT: Apparently the Navy is going to put all mechanical controls back. I was totally wrong. My guess is a bunch of retired flag officers at some defense contractor pitched it and close to retirement flag officers approved it. Maybe in 10 years, they will quietly change it behind closed doors but more than likely, someone has great idea of using Vision Pro to control everything because Heads Up Display or some insane thing they can sell to Navy for big money.
account42 2y ago
If making the primary propulsion some ad-hoc touchscreen control instead of a physical lever is only something you can get to with hindsight then you shouldn't even be anywhere near to a position where you can make that mistake.
- figassis 2y ago
  The point is that this was likely only one of many poor design decisions that were and will keep being made. I get touch screens are universally bad for operating vehicles or any other machine that requires attention, muscle memory and quick response times, but, if another disaster happens tomorrow for some other design issue not related to touch screens, will he then write another post about how that was the main issue? Because it's not the main issue. The crew where unaware of the physics of the controls. Would this not have happened with physical controls? It seems it is not immediately obvious at any time how much steering is being caused by the propellers or the rudder. Having 2 physical levers positioned differently would not make it more obvious to someone already unaware of this. They woud likely not look for the Gang button even if it were a giant red button. Now if the gang feature were designed (physically or digitally) to always snap back to locked unless some constant pressure is applied (like a spring), maybe this would be imprinted into every crew member.
  - pdonis 2y ago
    > Having 2 physical levers positioned differently would not make it more obvious to someone already unaware of this. Yes, it would, because it's so much easier to see. Remember that everybody on that bridge, which includes the Captain and the Officer of the Deck, was unaware of how the throttles were set. Two physical levers would have made it obvious to those people, and they could then have issued the right commands to fix it.
    - jeroenhd 2y ago
      I think making essential controls touch screen based is stupid for a variety of reasons, but I don't think physical levers would've changed the situation. Airplanes have crashed because pilots misinterpreted physical levers, switches, displays, and lights. There have been accidents where a (co)pilot was confused by the lack of power they themselves were physically applying with their hands. You can add synchronised force-feedback levers to every station, but that doesn't matter if your crew is too sleep-deprived to understand what those levers mean anyway. Not understanding the UI was only a small part in a huge shit show of problems that plagued the ship, and it was hardly the first time this sort of thing happened on that particular ship either.

pta2002 2y ago

This website is completely unreadable on an ultrawide monitor, it seems to make the font size dependent on the window's width, which makes it absolutely massive (I can maybe fit half a paragraph on the screen?), and the browser zoom does not seem to change the font size because of it...

DrScientist 2y ago
Ironic
alt227 2y ago
> the browser zoom does not seem to change the font size because of it This is one of the worst cases of this I have seen. It is literally unreadable for me. Normally I can use browser zoom to sort it out, but this beauty even defeats that workaround.
- rmarques7 2y ago
  The irony of this happening on an article talking about bad design...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - hgomersall 2y ago
    It's not ironic; it just demonstrates that design is hard to get right.
    - kmoser 2y ago
      It's not hard to design a web page that's 95% text and which lets the user adjust the font size via the browser's zoom controls.
- tapland 2y ago
  Yup, but while making the window smaller to write this I noticed I can make it a small window, about the size of my phone, to get text that is reasonable. The site, giving UI advice, is written assuming your display is always ~7" ?

junaru 2y ago

> Two years ago a Navy destroyer was ripped open by the nose of a Liberian tanker. Ten sailors were crushed or drowned as their sleeping quarters filled with water after the collision. At the heart of the tragedy is a single checkbox on a touchscreen. No, this is crew incompetence, the checkbox is just covering the fact the crew has no idea how the vehicle works or how to operate it. > The crew believed they had lost control of the ship because they were relying on the main steering controls, the rudder, without realizing that the ship was turning because of the secondary steering method, propellors set at different speeds Let that sink in (no pun intended) - the crew is not aware the propellors can spin at different speeds... for three minutes... with what appears to be two giant sliders on the screen.

Prickle 2y ago
Not to forget, the same problem has happened before with aircraft pilots. Someone doesn't notice that the the wrong engines are running, or someone forgot to power down one of the engines. Or there was an engine failure. And in the confusion, someone powers down the wrong engines. Usually in these cases, fatigue or information overload is a major factor. The pilots were fully qualified. They were simply overworked, and too tired to realize their mistake. I wouldn't assign all the blame to lack of training. The navy is very famously overworked and understaffed, and not just in the USA.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  The air industry is very good at blame-less post-mortems and finding root causes. I think the Navy could benefit from some things from their playbook. I think one major contributing factor is that Navy ships are so bespoke compared to airliners.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    The Nuclear Navy is also excellent at post-mortems (though they’re called critiques – it is still quite possible and reasonable to blame someone if indeed it was personnel failure) and finding root causes. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the conventional fleet did things completely differently.

maxglute 2y ago

>We create rules enforcing mandatory sleep requirements stupidly believing that we can eliminate the potential for a user of the system to be drowsy while at the controls. >stupidly believing Dick move by author to reveal his level of ignorance of USN operation tempo around McCain collision until the last few paragraphs. There were lol 4 fucking surface ship collisions and a grounding in westpac in 2017 because sailors were ran ragged, leading to operation pause. UX wasn't the primary problem. Sailors weren't "drowsy", they were sleep deprived, hopped up on stimulants etc due to manning shortages and long deployments, and likely lax training (due to shortages), which caused USS Connecticut accident a few years later. I'm sure you can improve UI for audience subsisting on 3-5 hours of sleep, but maybe the more pressing thing to try is to get them more sleep. IIRC there was study on navy sleep hyigene and like 100% of sailors in bottom quartile experienced bewilderment/confusion. https://news.usni.org/2017/09/18/admiral-captain-removed-part-investigation-uss-john-s-mccain-uss-fitzgerald-collisions-head-surface-forces-puts-early-retirement-request https://news.usni.org/2017/09/18/admiral-captain-removed-par...

moconnor 2y ago
Ignorance is not a “dick move”, it’s having something to learn. The extreme sleep deprivation doesn’t really conflict with the author’s point that better UI could have avoided this. Better sleep could have too.
- DSingularity 2y ago
  Certainly true but I think he is saying that the author should have indicated his limited knowledge of the context of the collision early on in the article.
  - maxglute 2y ago
    Yes, I'm being overly uncharitable, but it takes very inept research to study Mccain accident and not be exposed to the other 3 accidents, or be generally aware of the state of 7th fleet / condition of sailors from any of the reports. 4 major accidents do not happen in that specific fleet (out of 7) because of UXUI, when the other 6 fleets operate the same ships. Extra side eye of commentary/conclusion reducing cripplingly bad culture around sleep to "drowsiness" because elevating UXUI / blaming checkbox works less well when operators are mentally not there. You don't UXUI truckers so they can drive safely on a few hours of sleep, you regulate how long they can drive to make sure they get enough sleep.

firesteelrain 2y ago

The checkbox isn’t the “smoking gun” but rather part of a broader range of system issues in design and usability that likely contributed the USS John McCain accident. Having developed these types of systems though, the UX goes through heavy HMI reviews by real users and engineers. Likely whomever built this ship had those reviews. I would like to understand if this checkbox and its related design ever came up in those reviews and whether engineers were directed by their Navy customer to change it. It’s possible it was just a small footnote on a PowerPoint slide and they moved on.

iforgotpassword 2y ago
I think this is the actual wtf, along with the transfer ui: > The transfer of thrust comes with an additional level of complexity because the propellors must be transferred one at a time. Half way through a transfer the boat is in a situation where one propellor is controlled by one station and the other is controlled by someone else. At this moment the checkbox labeled “Gang” is automatically unchecked. Absolutely no surprise that in a moment of panic, the thrust controls end up spread across multiple stations. Why is this even a feature? Not a sailor so just armchair commenting, but in what situation would that be beneficial?
- firesteelrain 2y ago
  From what I was able to infer this is the use case of “Splitting Thrust Control During Station Transfer” (btw I made that up just based on my reading of it. I don’t design Navy ship subsystems for a living - I work on specialized subsystems like these) The temporarily assigning control of each propeller to different stations would require the automatic deselection of a synchronization (or "Gang") function during the transfer. Why weren’t they properly trained on this? How did they get into this situation unknowingly? I would assume a provided manual by the manufacturer would have trained the Sailors on how to properly perform this function. This sounds like a more exceptional than routine use case.
  - willyt 2y ago
    I've experience of steering a twin prop 50 tonne SAR vessel so quite a bit smaller than this but still same principles. We also have strict procedures for transferring command of the helm between different stations. There is never a situation where you would want the throttles for each prop split between command stations. There is almost never a situation where you would want the throttle controls at a different station than the helm (the person steering). The throttles and the rudder interact a lot and in any close quarters manoeuvring situation you want helm and throttles all under the control of one person.

netsharc 2y ago

Meta: irony is talking about bad UI, on a webpage where the typeface is just too damn big for a 1080p desktop screen, and using the browser's zoom out function doesn't do anything because of some "clever" CSS for the font-size.

f1shy 2y ago
I was going to say the same. Have seen similar comments below… Real irony!
- netsharc 2y ago
  Ah, I skimmed through the comments and didn't see anything mentioning it. I must've skimmed way too fast!
  - pjc50 2y ago
    HN always comments on bad web page design, to the extent of detracting from the content.
    - teddyh 2y ago
      Bad web page design already detracts from the content. Complaints about bad web design are attempts to resurrect the content.
bheadmaster 2y ago
For anyone reading this, if you want to remove this "clever" CSS font-size, here's the option you need to disable in Inspect Element screen: :root { font-size: calc(1vw + 1vh + .5vmin); } It is bound to the <html> tag itself, so there's no need for element hunting.
mdavid626 2y ago
Why the hell would you do that? Makes no sense at all.
2y ago

zweifuss 2y ago

While I agree with most of the assessment, I think that checkbox is fine. Removing the set of motorized haptic control levers and the motorized steering wheel at the brigde is a problem. Had the designers needed to integrate the feedback forces, they could have visualized them on the gui only stations too.

pjc50 2y ago

The traditional engine order telegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_order_telegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_order_telegraph is a beautiful piece of mechanical design. A more modern version would be aircraft-style throttle handles, which are also placed close together so that you naturally move two or four of them together with one hand movement. Reducing that to a checkbox just seems .. inadequate.

VBprogrammer 2y ago
Similar controls are used on modern ships. They usually though have an option to control both engines with one throttle to avoid having to manually synchronise the speed of both. Not sure if they have a reversion to separate control if someone grabs the currently redundant lever.
sgarland 2y ago
As Wikipedia states, nuclear vessels still have EOTs, though they’ve evolved. On Virginia-class subs, the EOT has been made into a linear button array. It’s arranged in logical order (All Ahead Flank at top, descending to All Stop, then down to All Back Emergency; there are small gaps in between Ahead, Stop, and Back groups), and the button flashes when an order is received. There’s also an audible alert, of course. The throttles themselves are small hand wheels, with the astern wheel being smaller and offset from the ahead wheel. These send redundant signals to the main engine controllers (which also redundant), which ultimately control the main engines. In the event of an emergency, there is a manual override station between the main engines – this is outside of maneuvering, and would require a different watchstander to man, since the propulsion plant operator is also running the reactor. To your main point though, yes, a checkbox is inadequate. Physical controls are generally superior, which is why car manufacturers who moved away from them are starting to move back.
- bfrink 2y ago
  This (seemingly elegant) Virginia-class implementation feels like an inheritance of the Rickover and SUBSAFE philosophy. Not sure how the surface Navy would accept anything less.

jmyeet 2y ago

That's a really good write-up. To summarize, the checkbox in question was designed such that it's lit up when checked and not when it isn't. I'm surprised they did this because it's terrible design. You see this all over the place. It confuses the user who thinks there should be a check there and can't tell if it's checked or not checked merely by glancing at it. I was happy to see this: > The Navy recently announced they are abandoning touchscreens in their fleet in favor of physical controls. The author defends touch controls and the decision being based on really old standards and one survey (apparently). I'm going to respectfully disagree. I'm no ship captain but I believe the propeller controls on a ship are traditionally like the levers on the right of this image [1]. This is from a multi-propeller cruise ship, I believe. Now if you had those controls, anyone could tell at a glance that the propellers weren't synchronized. Touchscreens allow for UI updates more easily. This leads to designers being lazy. "We can fix it in an update". It necessitates training on checkboxes. Stop. Just... stop. [1]: https://www.marineinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/engine-telegraph.png.webp https://www.marineinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/eng...

kmoser 2y ago
I don't understand the difference. With a touch-screen, if the propellers aren't synchronized, you would see it immediately on the green bars: if you slide one and the other doesn't slide similarly, they aren't synchronized.

CodeVenturer 2y ago

[dead]

Gnarl 2y ago

Next episode: nuke control systems UI

hypeatei 2y ago
Hopefully there isn't dark patterns with the confirm button on that one :D
sgarland 2y ago
Virginia-class has lots of screens, but they aren’t touchscreens. The control panels have physical buttons and switches which are clearly labeled, logically laid out, and are extremely tactile. There is no confirmation for anything, because it’s assumed that you received verbal confirmation of your intended action before performing it. Conversely, they also have computers for some maintenance items, and those (intelligently) have confirmation screens everywhere, because it’s just bog-standard Windows UI. The software UI team really should talk to the control panel UI team.
arethuza 2y ago
Write instructions for use of your countries nukes on handwritten letters in sealed envelopes and put one copy in each submarine!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ghufran_syed 2y ago

I have no experience in ship-handling, but my naive question for this who do is: What is the rationale for being able to independently transfer control of different aspects of ‘steering’ (prop1, prop2, rudder) to different stations? . The coordination required between two or more stations inherently makes the task (control of heading and thrust) more difficult than if a single station was coordinating the process inside one brain. Is there some benefit I am not seeing that justifies the increased complexity?

VBprogrammer 2y ago
I'm not a mariner but from what I've seen on boats and motoryachts the controls are typically transferred with the engines in neutral. This step ensures that the person who takes control positively knows the state of the engines and avoids having to do some kind of synchronisation with the current state. Perhaps this is problem on a destroyer or they imagined the controls being routinely moved around the bridge. On most vessels it's in the same place for the whole passage and for docking or departure you chose which station to use. Idling the engines for a minute while you have isn't an imposition as anyone prudent would be doing propulsion and steering tests before entering a confined area at that point anyway. I can only think the imagined the controls being passed about on a regular basis and because they didn't need to synchronise the physical position with the current state they skipped that step. Why transferring one engine at a time made sense I have no idea.
- kmoser 2y ago
  It seems to me that the checkbox, and even the UI, is the least of the issues. Even with the most intuitive manual controls, this problem still could have easily happened simply because the transfer of control from one station to another is fraught with potential misunderstanding of what state the different parts of the ship are in (rudder, engines, etc.) and who has control of each at any given time. Lack of sleep will exacerbate it tremendously. More training will only help so much; I'm guessing, they probably already train on this a lot. My armchair assessment is that these ships should be controlled 99% by computer, which decides the best combination of thrust, rudder, etc. to move the ship where the navigator directs it (whether by joystick to indicate direction, or touch-screen to indicate where on the map you want the ship to go, as well as what speed), and the individual controls (engines, rudder, etc.) should only be overridden in the most dire of circumstances. I'm sure there's much more to it than that, but the general idea remains the same: this is too complicated to be left to humans, whose time is better spent thinking about other parts of the mission.

moring 2y ago

It is not only the ship's UI that lacks review in the post-mortem analysis, but also the process that lead to it. "Conspicuously absent from their recommendations was any discussion about user interface design." _Why_ did the NTSB not review the user interface? What is their motivation, and the forces that influence their actions? Is the NTSB sufficiently staffed with experts on user interfaces? If not, why not? > These specifications come from a document written in 1988. Is the process to update Standard F1166 sufficient? (Probably not.) Why? Why is a document that is clearly outdated used to guide UI design in a newly designed ship? What are the incentives and forces that lead to this outdated standard being used, and no update fixing it? Related: CAST handbook, http://sunnyday.mit.edu/CAST-Handbook.pdf http://sunnyday.mit.edu/CAST-Handbook.pdf

stackskipton 2y ago
NTSB has zero jurisdiction here. This happened in International Waters between US Military and Liberian Flagged ship.

pdonis 2y ago

Hm. Someone whose entire article is about bad UI design makes it impossible for me to make the way-too-large fonts on the page smaller by using the controls my browser has specifically for that purpose. I haven't even read the article yet and I'm already skeptical about this author.

philipwhiuk 2y ago
It looks like this is a known issue with his handcrafted CMS: https://github.com/adrian3/whisper/issues/5 https://github.com/adrian3/whisper/issues/5
- pdonis 2y ago
  So whisper is 6 years old and this supposed UI expert never noticed this issue? Or, for that matter, never considered that maybe trying to dynamically calculate font size--instead of just using standard CSS sizes like, oh, I dunno, "100%" or "medium", which are specifically intended to present the best font size for the user taking into account their device's configuration--wasn't a good idea?
riknos314 2y ago
I literally gave up on trying to read the article because of this. The eyestrain from the font size nearly immediately gave me a headache.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

knodi123 2y ago

Anybody have a non-paywalled link? I'm not making a monthly membership so I can keep reading past the 2nd paragraph...

renewiltord 2y ago

The problem was that these guys didn't have any sleep. Lots of people think like they're against Sicilians When Death Is On The Line and that if they just slow poison their folks they'll become immune to poison. Well, just like giving your children small amounts of mercury every day doesn't turn them into a mercury-immune kid, not letting people sleep doesn't lead to sleep immune people. It just transforms people into idiots. So they transformed all their people into idiots. And then the idiots crashed the boat. If you did the same to me, I assure you I would be even stupider and my performance even more lacking.

yamazakiwi 2y ago
I was on that ship but left before the accident, I'm pretty positive it was sleep deprivation. The schedule changed at sea frequently so you couldn't get used to what little sleep pattern you were getting. We also had surprise drills that can happen literally any time of day or night. Longest I stayed awake was 72 hours straight.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Now imagine what happens to you when you get a doctor in the second half of his shift.

jfoutz 2y ago

I tried for a long time to use this keyboard effectively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks but I never really could. I like the touchscreen idea, your user interface is the user interface you were trained on, Star Trek style. I think light and sound engineers probably have the best setup. everything's hooked up to a big board with sliders. you can physically move the sliders, and the position of the slider represents what's actually happening. But you can also set up a scene on an attached computer. Click the button, or tap the touch screen, all the sliders move to the predesignated state. I don't know a damn thing about battleships, or destroyers. But a big ass console, with physical knobs and sliders that represent the current state seems like a really good idea. Sure, you can adjust whatever from whatever glass station you want. But everyone can tell at a glance, the state of the world. You can walk over and turn the knob, overriding everything else. And everybody can see you do it, and hopefully understand what that action means. The closest I get to that sort of stuff is my car. The hazard lights are one big dedicated button. There may be a way to turn them on with the touchscreen, I don't know. Volume has a physical dial on the console. There are buttons on the steering wheel, but I find myself reaching for the dial when I really need to turn the volume down. Physical controls are expensive. I imagine there's stuff that's common and essential, that, it's probably a good idea to spend the money and have the control. I have strong feelings about this. There are little fiddly settings that you can tuck away under five layers of menus. But there's other stuff That you touch all the time, or you need in an emergency, that IMHO, you should be allowed to build up muscle memory to accomplish.

karaterobot 2y ago

> When a physical control is replaced by a digital interface, it is the job of a designer to translate the functions of the controls into pixels. If designed well the UI is intuitive. When designed poorly, the interface is difficult to understand and causes users to make mistakes. Ugh. I don't want to quote all 25 of the things I disagree with about this article, so here's the first one that came up. A well-designed UI is not necessarily intuitive. Think about vi, or the command line, or Blender, or Figma, or pretty much any UI designed for experts who spend every day using the system. These UIs trade intuitiveness and simplicity for power and speed. They do so knowingly. It's not actually desirable to make a UI intuitive—which is to say, to make it behave the way a naive user would expect the first time they use it. Not if you can instead make it more powerful, and train the users how to use it instead. An intuitive submarine control might have buttons to go up and down, left and right, and turn, and then a big red button that says "launch torpedo", like in video games. But I bet that's a bad UI for a real submarine. Instead you want it to have a lot of information on the screen, and hundreds of different functions it can perform if only you've gone through an intense training program to learn how to operate it, which is what the Navy does. I don't think that being difficult to understand and prone to making mistakes is the opposite of intuitive, either. I think those are orthogonal. None of this is to excuse the design of that system, which I've never used, and can't defend or attack. It's just I know that this is a hard problem that you can't get around by saying "just design it better".

disillusioned 2y ago
This is a really interesting counter-argument. The idea that the design should be dumbed down so, what, a lay-person who has never encountered the system can take over and drive the ship accurately? is an appealing one: it makes the case that, all else being equal, simplicity should win out. I would argue that there's an in-between: good design is not orthogonal to intuitive design. And I would also argue that the human factor component shouldn't be missed here, both in terms of sleep deprivation, but also in terms of being able to easily and quickly identify error states or misconfigurations at a glance, without too much cognitive overload. Cognitive overload and complex interfaces are solved with training and repetition: we do this regularly in aviation, pilotage, and all sorts of complex interfaces. But I guess it's worth asking aloud, if you can reduce some of the cognitive overload, aren't you effectively defending in depth? Sure, every complex system could be distilled to a memorized green screen incantation, and peak performance can be reached by fusing the human brain to a well-mapped, ultra-dense information-fest. But the reality of the situation is that, when training and tiredness failed these sailors, the interface further piled on _unnecessarily_. It could have been designed to be a bit more intuitive, and that might very well have saved the lives of 10 people and $223 million dollars of taxpayer money. "This is a hard problem that you can't get around by just saying 'just design it better'" sure downplays that amount of impact intuitive, clear design can have on, say, preventing the swiss cheese holes from aligning in this particular case.

benreesman 2y ago

Anyone who cares about defense procurement should support Palmer and Anduril to the extent they can.

timnetworks 2y ago

> Part I, UI Design why stop me from making text smaller on your site while coming up with headlines like this? smh

illnewsthat 2y ago
I know there is a HN guideline about not commenting on stuff like this, but in this case the text was so large it prevented me from wanting to read the article at all. Just uncomfortably large.
- taspeotis 2y ago
  I have a 49" ultrawide and if I maximise the window, it is borderline unreadable. https://imgur.com/DGWQDpI https://imgur.com/DGWQDpI

jojobas 2y ago

Sounds like if it were two throttle handles with a "lock" lever below them they could fail exactly the same. It's a training/attention/fatigue issue, not a UI one.

DangitBobby 2y ago
If they were independent levers capable of being physically locked together, you'd probably notice when they aren't moving together. Of course, you could easily have similar visual feedback on a touch screen. Seems like the real issue is described later in the article; throttle control can be split between control stations, which is actually insane, I can't imagine a scenario where you'd want that.
- jojobas 2y ago
  The fact that control settings were not synchronized between stations and cleared when turning over control is sure a blunder. The checkbox is not to be blamed however, it's a sane design choice. Fun fact: on some airplanes if you pull on the captain's yoke and push on the first officer's, the elevator will split, the left part doing the nose up, the right one doing nose down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990

chmorgan_ 2y ago

Very good writeup around the issue. The Navy could look to aircraft for some design guidance. There are significant market competitive forces pushing for user centric design when it comes to the interfaces of modern aircraft. They also have to deal with making new things look and work kind of like older systems, and provide interfaces that simplify information.

Animats 2y ago

Supposedly the control system has been fixed by adding physical levers, with retrofits to existing ships.[1] Unclear if they're all coupled together, so that moving a lever at one location moves all the other levers. That's a standard feature available for commercial ships. For two stations, it can be done with mechanical cables. Beyond that, there are electrical systems. This is a known cause of accidents with ship controls with multiple control stations. There was a New York City Seastreak ferry crash in 2013 due to that. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/11/20800111/us-navy-uss-john-s-mccain-crash-ntsb-report-touchscreen-mechanical-controls https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/11/20800111/us-navy-uss-john... [2] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/pages/DCA13MM005.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/pages/DCA13MM005.aspx

ajkjk 2y ago

One thing that bums me out about this is the idea that figuring this kind of thing out is what "designers" do. As if there is some special skillset and art to design that a special group of people, designers, do, which we should take seriously. No, this is just what non-idiots do. Any non-idiot would look at this UI and think: this is terrible.

cdbyr 2y ago
One nice thing about designers is their tie-breaking ability for non-designers. Design, being something we all think we’re right about, is easy to lose lots of time going back and forth on with non-specialists, while it’s much faster to send to a pro. But I generally agree with you, I think the world would be better if everyone was more thoughtful about this sort of thing.
- mulmen 2y ago
  How do you justify all the bad UIs though? Is just making a decision, any decision, somehow better than making a good one?
jeroenhd 2y ago
Looking at the UI, I see consistently applied patterns in a pretty normalised layout. I don't know how to use any of the controls, but that's because I don't know how to steer a warship, not because the UI is bad. Had I known what "gang" means in this context, the problem would've been clear from the very first screenshot. Yes, the UI is ugly as sin, but it doesn't need to be pretty. A barely trained 18 year old on months of sleep deprivation couldn't figure this out, but that's an impossible standard to design for. The entire ship was designed to use computer aided navigation anyway, but apparently that's being disabled by default.
moring 2y ago
Are the people who designed this UI idiots? If no, then that contradicts your argument. Non-designers obviously do get it wrong. If yes, your argument has become a "no true scotsman" -- it no longer makes a statement about the capability of anyone, but simply defines "idiot" as people who get the UI wrong. Besides that, hindsight is 20/20. Was the UI obviously terrible before the accident happened?

Jean-Papoulos 2y ago

"Conspicuously absent from their recommendations was any discussion about user interface design. Of their seven safety recommendations, six involve training." Yes. That's because if your ship is going left and you can't figure out why when there's an interface clearly showing why (ie one engine input is higher then the other), it is a training and/or procedure issue. The author then goes on to state that during steering control transfer, the checkbox is automatically unchecked. So the engine input UI is 100% not at fault here.

moring 2y ago
Finding something or someone to blame -- whether it is an operator, the UI, training, whatever -- typically halts all insight-gaining processes, and is therefore not recommended. Especially if that something is "100% to blame".
jchung 2y ago
> 100% not at fault When something significant goes wrong, it’s almost never due to a single cause; multiple factors and confounding elements are usually at play. We build better-performing systems when we examine various contributing factors and proximal causes. The OP's argument is that the interface does not "clearly" indicate that one engine input is higher than the other. After reading the article and reviewing the interfaces, I have to say: the OP’s argument is quite compelling. While training is undoubtedly important and should be included in the safety recommendations, the OP makes a strong case that design improvements should also be considered as part of the safety recommendations.
VBprogrammer 2y ago
The box is only unchecked because of the curious decision to allow transferring of a single prop / engine which I'm not convinced has any real value. One thing that isn't stated is what the state of the redundant thrust slider is when the inputs are ganged together. In the physical implementations I've seen the redundant lever is usually moved to neutral and it's not inconceivable that this was carried into the digital UI. In that case failing to spot the fact that there was a differential thrust involved because of the lack of a checkbox might be much more understandable.

naruhodo 2y ago

I found the article convincing. When the throttles are ganged, there should be only one slider. When they are not ganged, there should be a visual indication of the propeller speed differential. Perhaps a horizontal bar above the throttle sliders that grows left or right according to the consequent turning moment.

pbhjpbhj 2y ago

It's hard to believe they did user testing and this design came out on top. Take a person at the end of their shift, sit then in front of a 'steering a ship' game with this UI: "with the controls set this way, which way will the ship move?" "we showed you a UI for 1s, were the props ganged? What was the differential in engine output?". Presumably the US Navy has the user testing sessions recorded and archived somewhere?

kqr 2y ago

It seems that the operator is expected to sometimes make very small adjustments to the throttle level, going by what looks like clickable arrows. I wonder why they didn't locate the UI elements corresponding to throttle indicators butting right up against each other, with a Vernier scale on them, to make misalignments quantifiable and more obvious. Not that it would have helped in this case, but maybe the scale can be magnified and change colour when there is misalignment, which would have been possibly slightly more obvious? I don't know.

edwcross 2y ago

The article mentions "ASTM International Standard F1166", and shows a few pictures and recommendations concerning check boxes. I'm very much looking for this kind of thing, for React-like interfaces, so that (1) we don't have to spend too much time thinking about this sort of details, and (2) we respect some good design principles without having been trained on it. Unfortunately, the standard in question is quite expensive and probably most of it will not be useful for web design. Is there an equivalent document/standard for websites?

ionwake 2y ago

Ill be honest I am kind of confused. Why is there sleep deprivation in the most powerful Navy in the world? I thought it wasn't run as a "the least hands for the job" type corporate culture as surely there is in essence unlimited budget. Or is this naive? Does every organisation/organism always minimise expenditure as much as possible until something sort of breaks?

sandworm101 2y ago

>> the previous sailor may have set the rudder 5 degrees right in order to compensate for wind or water current. >> In older ships, speed is basically controlled by a forward/backward joystick. Push it forward and the ship accelerates. Pull it back and the boat slows or goes in reverse. >> Most of the flaws of the touchscreens could be just one software update away. Sorry, they lost me with this. Dont lecture professionals about interfaces if you clearly do not understand the systems controlled by those interfaces. Ships are not cars. Rudders are not steering wheels. This is not a video game.

mrob 2y ago

The F1166 standard permits up to 250ms latency for touch screen response. That is ridiculously high. It practically guarantees people will think it's not working and tap again, undoing any toggle function they might have activated. They won't necessarily notice their mistake. I once accidentally ran a washing machine at 90C temperature because of high-latency touch controls. I instinctively double-pressed the touch surface to reduce temperature because I thought the first touch hadn't registered, causing it to wrap around back to maximum. It did some minor damage to the clothes before I noticed. And that was with more like 200ms latency, not 250ms. Latency on touchscreens is more important than with physical controls because there's no tactile feedback. Even 10ms is obviously imperfect for drag controls. Microsoft Research published a demonstration video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

kryogen1c 2y ago
> permits up to 250ms latency for touch screen response. That is ridiculously high. It practically guarantees people will think it's not working and tap again You're saying people evaluate and react to checkbox feedback faster than 4 times/sec? I'm not a UX person so this claim seems laughable. I might believe twice that as beyond reasonable, but there is no way the average person waits less than a quarter of a second before assuming their input failed and duplicate the effort. One can hardly even observe and process that quickly - even when paying attention.
- the__alchemist 2y ago
  250ms is significant in this context, and is a longer period than you evidently think.
  - vsuperpower2021 2y ago
    The user is either a web developer or has some neurological disorder that dulls his ability to react. There's no other explanation for not knowing how long 250 ms is.
- mrob 2y ago

rbanffy 2y ago

It's not that touchscreens didn't exist when F1166 was written. At that time it was widely understood a touch in a touchscreen would be a click and a drag would be a mouse-down + move + mouse-up sequence. The sliders seem to be designed to be both draggable and the two buttons for precise incremental adjustments. What I find disturbing is that there doesn't seem to be a single The-Most-Important-Thing screen visible to everyone. I'd expect things like heading, steering, and engine power would be immediately available and readily visible, most important when a possible collision is identified. And I hope people realise emergency manual control is for resolving emergencies rather than creating them.

hcarvalhoalves 2y ago

Despite all other factors involved in the accident, it seems fundamentally hard to make this kind of control obvious with a touch screen. With a physical throttle control, like used in aviation [1], it's more obvious when you're pushing one side or both, as you have both vision and tactile senses to confirm position. [1] https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.y8DdQsqhqkM_iA1f8k-qcAHaEo&pid=Api https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.y8DdQsqhqkM_iA1f8k-qcAHaE...

frabjoused 2y ago

It's fascinating to me that these controls were "upgraded" to a VB-style interface in 2016.

pyrale 2y ago

This looks like an article written by a designer obsessed by how important design is, and how anyone could pilot a warship without training if designers made something perfect. It's a good reminder for software people sometimes overemphasizing the importance of software in a given situation, and how the processes encompassing it interact with it and control its outcomes.

AmazingTurtle 2y ago

regarding bad design, for this blog post: font-size: calc(1vw + 1vh + .5vmin); i can not zoom in or out, makes me go crazy

atoav 2y ago

Ganging is a term usually associated with faders on light control desks or audio mixing consoles. A typical way to indicate ganging in digital audio interfaces is by coloring the knows in the same color (usually very distinct from the rest of the interface) or by displaying a horizontal line that literally connects them. For me the astounding part here is the complete lack of visual feedback of the end result. Sure I have limited nautical experience, but from sailing I know ships are a lot about force vectors. I would have imagined a ship of that class has a clever and intuitive way of displaying the forces acting on it (and the forces applied by its various parts). This could literally be 3 horizontal bars with a 0 in the center. If the bar is filled to the left that bar makes you go left, if your bar is filled to the right, that is where it makes you go and if it is centered, you go to the center. One bar describes the resulting turning direction of both engines, one the turning direction as indicated by the rudder and one the sum of both. Sure there is then some ambiguity about what that means when you go backwards etc, but hey, one look at that would have told you "engine makes us go left".

efitz 2y ago

The article says "If you don’t have the vocabulary to describe a problem it is unlikely that you will be able to fix it." I fundamentally disagree with this. You don't need to know design jargon to identify bad design or to make good design. What you need is to understand what the user is likely to know and what you need to tell them. This is different than just providing controls, which is what most design by engineers looks like. For example, I would characterize the overall design problems with the UX as: 1. Users need to understand at a glance how each control input is currently influencing the course of the ship. Separately the users need to understand at a glance what the resultant course and position of the ship will be given the current control inputs and external factors like wind and current. 2. Users need to understand at a glance which station is controlling the ship, with intuitive controls to offer to pass control to, or accepting control from, a different station. So I can describe the problem without using any UI jargon. Similarly I can refer to these to indicate why the current UI is broken, again without UI jargon, simply by saying "it doesn't solve problem 2 because the state is unclear" or whatever.

iamleppert 2y ago

With a craft like that, there is no position hold mode? It's common in almost all autonomous or semi-autonomous systems. Basically, without input from the pilot, the craft will hold its current position. That is, let go of the input or sticks, and the thing will automatically hold its current position. Crazy to hear that such an expensive boat is basically driven by rate only controllers.