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Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

pfft.

The concept of "user friendliness" dates back a lot longer in ww2. During the industrial revolution industry went on a binge of making things more "user friendly" because it reduced human error and reduced downtime spent fixing machines and hosing former workers out of them. This is why, for example, on a lathe you traditionally have different shaped Z and X handles. It prevents you from crashing the machine by having your hand on the wrong handle when you go to make a rough adjustment.

A bored journalist could write the same article about user friendliness in the early industrial workplace, it would just be harder because there's no one big story to base your article around and the sources are harder to find.

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Honestly, this is kind of an arrogant response. The phrases "user error", "designer error" and "user friendly" were a direct result of the investigation into the B-17 mishaps, which were many, and unexplained until investigated.

Yes, good design is an old phenomenon - such is the nature of technology. But the article didn't make the claim that design started after WW2 - just that the importance of the designer / user relationship became better coded in the language of industry which followed the post-war period.

We had generational shifts in UI design pre-war. But we didn't have computers, which have manifested every design flaw ever, and still are pretty crap to use.

The point of this article is not to make boisterous claims about contemporary design - but to point out that the user / designer relationship is still more relevant than ever. Also, people are still crashing planes, metaphorically in their user interface designs. The age of dark patterns is upon us.

The B17 crashed because of dark patterns.

Yeah - the article is well written, but junk and full of hyperbole like:

"He saw, instead, the impossibility of flying these planes at all." Really! B-17's completed hundreds of thousands of missions.

And pilots still land modern planes "wheels up", so modern UI design has not eliminated the problem.

To be fair, the few times I've sat in the cockpit of a plane I've said to myself "good lord, one person has to keep on top of all these dials and controls" - six dials in a glider that doesn't even have an engine? Fifteen in a small plane for non-professional pilots? To say nothing of the cockpits of commercial airliners and fighter jets.

And presumably every one of those dials corresponds to something important the pilot has to be monitoring and controlling.

There aren't many vehicles with an interface that complex.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way, the actual flight controls are pretty rudimentary and simple to understand. The dials represent information and tools available to the pilot should they need them. They're all pretty simple taken in isolation, and they usually have configurable warning states, so you don't need to watch them like a hawk.

Also, you can halve the count in most cockpits, as they'll be redundancy duplicates or co-pilot duplicates. Cognitive load during flight is pretty low, too, so plenty of time to keep an eye on things. Landings and take offs are prepared for with plenty of time ahead (at least they should be) so again, plenty of time to check and configure.

Over time, you get used to where all the gauge needles should be and it becomes easy to notice if something is out of place. The AAA gauges, Attitude, Altitude, Airspeed are the most important, and also the ones that change a lot. Something like EGT or the voltmeter is just for diagnosing error conditions. A warning light will turn on if one of these values gets out of wack.

Numeric displays require a lot more conscious effort to read a number, decode it , decide if it is an acceptable value. This is why the steam gauge style remains popular, even if it is a digital render now.

Agreed. He also got the "bicycle for the mind" quote wrong -- kind of hard to do when Steve Jobs' explanation is a youtube search away: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTRzYjoZhIY

yeah, it sounds more like "people on the floor knew what the problem was, but management needed somebody from outside to tell them what the issue is".

Yes, a lot of that article was navel gazing at how smart we are today. None of these problems are new nor are the solutions discussed about novel. But they do need to be repeated, because they are not always obvious. I dunno why so many articles/books like these have to come off so "preachy"; ironically that in itself is not very user friendly.

Two pre-industrial examples:

When riding horses with two sets of reins, they have a tactile distinction, so one can sort them out without having to visually check which reins go where.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turk%27s_head_knot says "A notable practical use for the Turk's head is to mark the "king spoke" of a ship's wheel; when this spoke is upright the rudder is in a central position." and presumably a helmsman could be steering in the dark in inclement weather and still feel it.

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