Comment by belorn
1 day ago
The idea in the aerospace industry is that you should not blame the pilot, since pilot error became a all-catch rule no matter if there was design or system errors. The classical example is the button for the landing gear, where pilots continued to accidentally press it and crashing the plane. The engineers added guardrails to the button and the pilot error rate went down.
The lever for the landing gear and the lever for the flaps were easily confused. After landing the pilots intended to retract flaps but accidentally retracted the landing gear instead.
At first they assumed their recruitment process accidentally favoured stupid people so they made sure to only recruit smart pilots. But it kept happening. Then they put a little flap on the end of the flap lever and a small wheel on the end of the gear lever and the problem went away.
I simplify. Read the full story. It is cool!
That's my dad who worked at NaSA doing aeronautics stuff said.
Pilots fuck up all the time so blaming them doesn't excuse anything.
And I find myself butting heads with people over that all the time. Coworker (smug satisfied voice) well if the end user fucks up it's not our fault. Me (trying not to sound really annoyed) yeah it's still our problem.
Although it has far from mainstreamed yet, I like how the software industry has the notion of a “UX bug”: if the user failed at anything, the software is at fault, because it wasn’t easy enough to use.