Space Shuttle Flight Deck
360vr.com
360vr.com
This actually looks like a pretty effective interface for users who are willing to be trained for months. Think about it: after you are trained, every piece of information is just one glance away and every action is just one button click away.
I'd love to hear an opinion from an expert, though. sinks back into his armchair
ADDED. Norman said that one of the advantages is that when one operator lowers the aperture on value 68 (or whatever) the other operators can easily tell that that is what he is doing.
(In that context an interesting question is what this interface is optimized for. It may work great on normal flights – that’s nearly all of them, by the way – but break down horribly in emergencies. I guess the UI design rule of designing for the common and not the rare case doesn’t really apply here.)
In many ways, better to have a single giant control panel which lights up a different light for each error that can occur.
The result is that you can't build say, a prolog program which produces a huge switch statement to prioritize errors. As a result, there effectively is no prioritization of errors and warnings at all. They're all treated as the same severity.
The new standard, DO-178C allows for computer models to be used in verification. So we may start seeing automated prioritization and management in the generation of planes after the A380/787.
People _loved_ the old one because having lots of buttons you can tune almost in parallel was much more efficient than the modal click-here, use-joystick workflow.
The newer EM generated much better images though, so the choice wasn't just between UIs.
Reminds me of the often-told story about Apollo 12 and how a little-known switch resolved an electrical issue that threatened the entire mission, though in that case it was a person on the ground who instructed an astronaut what to do. The following four-minute clip is from the documentary "Failure Is Not An Option."
There is an interesting talk which explores UI problems in airplanes (not quite Space Shuttles but also with a lot of buttons and, as far as the UI is concerned, with a lot of similar elements): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlEcCfEakro
(It's an interesting thought that it would have cost about $50,000 to get that laptop into space, weight-wise.)
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/space/space_think...
I guess this is similar to what non-programmers see when looking at source code: An impenetrable mess of gobbledygook where it would require months or years of dedicated effort to figure out what the different commands actually do.
That was a cool shot of the shuttle I've never seen before. I wonder how many of those controls are redundant systems you only need to touch if they light up?
The seats look awfully uncomfortable, though.
Interestingly for a helicopter this pattern is reversed, the control inputs required to control a helicopter are so much more demanding that the pilot sits on the right hand side so that he uses his right hand for the primary control and has to either make do with his left or temporarily switch hands to do the other stuff described above.