← Back to context

Comment by iso1631

2 days ago

Relevant history from the US Airforce in the 1940s when they tried to build a cockpit for the average pilot and failed

I find this an interesting take on the story

https://polkas.github.io/posts/cursedim/

This is also a good argument why "opinionated" designs like from Apple are a bad idea. The average user does not exist. Stop trying to turn us into one!

  • That’s different. Deciding you’re building a tool for a specific use-case is not related to “average users”.

    Tool companies manufacture claw hammers despite some people wanting a nail gun. You don’t try to make a thing flexible enough to be both a nail gun and a hammer.

    I’m a power user and I do all of my customization on my Linux desktop/laptop. I use an iPhone specifically because it’s locked down and don’t want a keyboard that has gone through no code review stealing all of my banking credentials.

  • I have used an iPhone for 8 years and a macbook for 2 years. Every year the experience gets worse, like on schedule. This theory might explain what is happening!

From the article, it seems like even if we only consider one dimension, there'd be ~70% of pilots that are uncomfortable. I'd have thought to at least cover 1 standard deviation, thus covering 68% of "average" pilots. But with 10 dimension it'd still only cover measly 2% of them. If we go to 2 std (95%), the 10-power would be ~60%. Quite small but seems acceptable if the initial target is only ~30% of pilots.

But of course this assume all variables are independent. Seems like we could actually push the tolerance much lower than this raw math would suggest.