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Comment by datpuz | Hacker News Reader

The UX in most software made for the government is terrible. At the end of the day, I think anyone clicking any button in that list should have been well aware of what those buttons do especially since clicking that button was a routine part of the shift change process in that shop.

Bad UX, sure. But that person dun goofed.

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Aka, blame the user, not the design. The FAA got away from that because it caused too many planes to drop out of the sky. Sure, user errors will happen, but designs should try to avoid them and mitigate their consequences.

I've been a software engineer in the defense industry my entire career. No contract I've ever been a part of included a UI/UX designer, I rather doubt the customer would have been willing to pay for one.

Interfaces are always designed by the programmers alone, and they are universally awful.

Heck, several years ago I remember having to learn Blender so I could create 3D models for some simulation software (no one else to do it, guess it's me again -> here have some rockets that look like something out of 1950s scifi). Apparently the folks writing the contract didn't think we'd need anyone with any 3D art skills to create 3D visualization software.