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.

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.