This is a fascinating article. I feel like I am in my life constantly fighting against either haphazard UI like the one featured there, and the Apple-style UIs which attempt to optimize for beauty by shoving nearly everything (regardless of usefulness) into layers of "••• junk drawers" or little (i) icons.
On a ship worth hundreds of billions of dollars, it was never considered that the Big Red Button should have a plain English red sign saying "Emergency Take-Control-Here Button. Press to return control to THIS station."
The software designers as well could have used plain and direct language too, and made it easy to do the right thing, and require deliberateness to do a weird thing. If it's wildly irregular to have 2 people independently doing port/starboard thrust control, the process should be like "Transfer Thrust Control", followed by a modal with a giant "BOTH SIDES" button and two tiny "Port only" "Stbd Only" buttons.
Also when you are moving around something as important as control of your ship, why not have a simple voice announcement, what does a loudspeaker cost, 20 dollars a piece? "The Thrust control has been transferred to the Lee Helm" or "All Controls were transferred to the Bridge because the Red Take-Control Button was pressed at that station."
Sometimes I think only thoughtless people and Jony Ive-worshipers are doing UI design.
> If it's wildly irregular to have 2 people independently doing port/starboard thrust control, the process should be like "Transfer Thrust Control", followed by a modal with a giant "BOTH SIDES" button and two tiny "Port only" "Stbd Only" buttons.
A contributing factor in the crash of Air France Flight 447 was that Airbus aircraft average the inputs of the two pilots side-stick flight controls (as oppose to Boeing, which connects the two yokes so you can't move one without moving the other). At various points leading up to the crash one pilot understood the situation and was applying the correct input to resolve the issue, but the other pilot was doing the opposite and canceled out the correct input. While there was an audible warning about the conflicting inputs, it was easily lost in the chaos of the moment.
On a ship worth hundreds of billions of dollars, it was never considered that the Big Red Button should have a plain English red sign saying "Emergency Take-Control-Here Button. Press to return control to THIS station."
The software designers as well could have used plain and direct language too, and made it easy to do the right thing, and require deliberateness to do a weird thing. If it's wildly irregular to have 2 people independently doing port/starboard thrust control, the process should be like "Transfer Thrust Control", followed by a modal with a giant "BOTH SIDES" button and two tiny "Port only" "Stbd Only" buttons.
Also when you are moving around something as important as control of your ship, why not have a simple voice announcement, what does a loudspeaker cost, 20 dollars a piece? "The Thrust control has been transferred to the Lee Helm" or "All Controls were transferred to the Bridge because the Red Take-Control Button was pressed at that station."
Sometimes I think only thoughtless people and Jony Ive-worshipers are doing UI design.