
How the design of a WWII plane led to the concept of user friendliness (2019) - BerislavLopac
https://www.wired.com/story/how-dumb-design-wwii-plane-led-macintosh/
======
WalterBright
There's a similar story with warning horns on aircraft. I think the first
warning horn added was a stall warning. It worked great. So they added more
horns with different sounds, one after another.

Eventually, it turns out that pilots got confused as to which horn meant what.
Something had to be done! The solution was ridiculously obvious - the horn
sounds were speech saying what is wrong, like "stall! stall!" instead of
"toot! toot!".

I think about that whenever I deal with a piece of machinery that emits random
beeps to warn me about something. Like my car. Really, how hard is it to say
"ya left ya lights on, ya fakking slagger!" so I would know what to do. At
least my navigator says "recalculating" when I screw up, although I prefer "ya
shoulda turned back yonder, ya witless wanker!"

Though I do wonder why they never put me in charge of the warning horn design.

~~~
dmckeon
A similar confusion may be audible in any McDonalds. Their kitchens have many
alerts and alarms, and many of them use the same tone. Get a beverage, stand
with a view behind the counter toward the kitchen, wait, and listen.

~~~
WalterBright
Back in the 80's people would make intelligible speech simply by connecting a
speaker to a 5V 1-bit I/O port. So there's no excuse from a cost standpoint.

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throwaway0a5e
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.

~~~
RachelF
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.

~~~
michaelt
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.

~~~
ehnto
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.

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sb057
>By law, that ingenious bit of design—known as shape coding—still governs
landing gear and wing flaps in every airplane today. And the underlying idea
is all around you: It’s why the buttons on your videogame controller are
differently shaped, with subtle texture differences so you can tell which is
which.

I'm not aware of any major controller that has done this outside of the
GameCube controller.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameCube_controller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameCube_controller)

~~~
ceejayoz
Xbox controllers have large buttons, small buttons, joysticks, a D-pad, and
two different triggers on the back.

The A/B/X/Y aren't distinguished between each other, but I suspect the four
throttles for a B-17 aren't either.

~~~
EricE
> The A/B/X/Y aren't distinguished between each other

Sure they are - their layout is distinct and doesn't alighn with any other
buttons on the controller. It's very easy to distinguish which one you are
hitting even though their shape and size are identical.

~~~
zelos
The Gamecube controller did it better, I think. Each button was a unique size,
shape and colour.

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userbinator
_It’s why the dials and knobs in your car are all slightly different,
depending on what they do._

This has become a real problem with newer cars where everything has been
replaced by a touchscreen.

~~~
DomenicoMazza
Touchscreens have their place but not to replace controls you can activate by
feel alone and access with less distraction.

~~~
dhsysusbsjsi
This.

Even to the point that I swear people designing cars don’t factor in 100%
tactile any more.

For example my Skoda has a full 360 degree knob for changing aircon vent
position with no detents. There is literally no way of changing from defog to
face without looking down and adjusting.

My Mazda on the other hand is more mechanical which may at first seem
“clunkier”, but it has stops on either end for face (fat counter clockwise)
and defog (full clockwise) so you can instantly choose the most common
settings. The in-between settings have large and small detents as you cycle
through so I can go 50% feet, 50% defog by going hard right then one click
back without looking.

~~~
kohtatsu
What is this phenomenon where garbage proliferates?

~~~
tomcam
Don’t worry, the Skoda is widely considered to be a failure.

Sorry, couldn’t resist

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DomenicoMazza
Paul Fitts mentioned in the article came up with Fitts’ Law to describe
selection difficulty as a relationship between target size and distance
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law)

While reading I had a feeling Fitts was well known for something!

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scorxn
"The reason why all those pilots were crashing when their B-17s were easing
into a landing was that the flaps and landing gear controls looked exactly the
same. The pilots were simply reaching for the landing gear, thinking they were
ready to land. And instead, they were pulling the wing flaps, slowing their
descent, and driving their planes into the ground with the landing gear still
tucked in."

~~~
082349872349872
+"*ç% automatic cars, with their brake pedal extended to where the clutch
ought to be...

------
scarier
This is a perennial problem in aviation. One of my favorite examples relates
to flaws in our assumptions about anthropometrics:
[https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-
air-...](https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-
discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html)

~~~
moring
While that article shows how too little configuration towards the individual
user leads to problems, there is a balance to find. In the software world, we
are often facing the opposite problem: Being overwhelmed by too many
configuration parameters, ironically leading to the same outcome because the
user is unable to configure the system at all. This is especially frustrating
when many of those parameters are not even adjusting the software to the
individual but are arbitrary free parameters like "in which folder do you want
the software to place its internal data files", or are about adjusting one
piece of software to another so they work together -- problems that should be
solved by the manufacturer without needing user input.

On an orthogonal note, I smiled when I read this paragraph about excuses from
the manufacturers:

> When airplane manufacturers first heard this new mandate, they balked,
> insisting it would be too expensive and take years to solve the relevant
> engineering problems. But the military refused to budge, and then — to
> everyone’s surprise — aeronautical engineers rather quickly came up with
> solutions that were both cheap and easy to implement. They designed
> adjustable seats, technology now standard in all automobiles. They created
> adjustable foot pedals. They developed adjustable helmet straps and flight
> suits.

------
TedDoesntTalk
> some of the most advanced computers ever made now come with only cursory
> instructions that say little more than "turn it on." This is one of the
> great achievements of the last century of technological progress.

Also the greatest contribution towards reduced curiosity, inquisitiveness, and
the hacker ethos.

------
236dev
>Fortress rolled off the drawing board and onto the runway in a mere 12 months

Now that's something you don't see these days! I wonder what has slowed
development so much, is it more complexity? It seems like a B-17 would be
considered extremely complex in 1940.

~~~
jeromescuggs
by 1940 it was already 4 years old :P in terms of development i assume this
refers to the field of aircraft design, and i think it might not be obvious at
first how dizzyingly complex modern aircraft can get. aerodynamics is already
a complicated thing, but then you have to design around stealthiness. since
your goal is both, physically operating such a vehicle would be almost
impossible because of instability issues, so you now have to design software
that will smooth out the aircraft as it flies, while still allowing the pilot
to do exactly what they want, when they need to. now you have to find parts
that will allow all of that to come together - powerplant, materials, etc -
for example, even the _paint_ for stealth aircraft had to be developed to help
reduce radar signature, etc etc etc

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FearNotDaniel
Thankfully, the interface designers for cars and planes don't break into your
garage/hangar in the middle of the night and move the controls around, change
their colour and shape, or rearrange the entire control panel without giving
you any warning or choice. App and web designers are quite keen on doing this.
Imagine if a Boeing pilot stepped into the cockpit one day and found it had
suddenly been reconfigured to look like an Airbus. Apps like MS Office have
orders-of-magnitude more users than airliners, and yet they don't bat an
eyelid when suddenly moving everyday functions to different parts of the
screen.

------
gridspy
Read: [https://humanisticsystems.com/2018/02/25/human-factors-
and-e...](https://humanisticsystems.com/2018/02/25/human-factors-and-
ergonomics-looking-back-to-look-forward/)

If you wanted more on HOW they fixed the bomber. That part was fascinating.

------
supernova87a
I don't know where to find this on the web, but I saved this favorite story
about why the MD-11 was such an ill-fated plane. Now re-reading it, brings to
mind the 737 MAX, no?

\-----------

 _The MD-11 had a whole range of issues that added up to a poor design._

McDD did the development of the MD-11 on the cheap, led by their illustrious
leader HS who did everything for minimum cost. It really needed a clean sheet
design wing rather than just adapting the DC-10 one (which had never been got
right in the first place and had excessive drag). But the money was not
provided to do this.

Madcap idea was to reduce the size of the horizontal stabiliser (the "tail")
compared to the DC-10 (despite the greater size), to reduce its drag. That
makes it more difficult to control. To then overcome this a computer called
the Longitudinal Stability Augmentation System was devised. We're speaking
about 25-30 year old computer technology here. This was meant to enhance the
way the tailplane worked. Another was that MD-11 pilots were to receive
"additional training", that euphemism for handling something difficult and not
intuitive.

Various outcomes ensued, particularly on landing. One is the MD-11 got the
universal nickname of "The Scud" in the pilot world because "you never know
where it's going to land" (remember the MD-11 came into service at the time of
the first Gulf War). Hence the "additional training" which concentrates on
landing aspects. The second was its propensity to then drag a wing in landings
that became unstable. This revealed a further poor (and cheap) piece of wing
design, as the wing will tend to break at the attachment, which then leads to
the aircraft cartwheeling on touchdown. For a type where only 200 were built,
the number which have been destroyed in these cartwheeling accidents (which
have never once happened to their Boeing or Airbus rivals) is just
unacceptable.

Now the MD-11 had other poor aspects. It didn't meet its performance
guarantees, which allowed a number who ordered it to walk away from it. The
Pratt & Whitney engined version in particular were unreliable. But more than
anything else Boeing came up with an aircraft of remarkably similar size which
used just two engines, not three, and yet delivered not only equal performance
but everything the MD-11 had claimed to do but didn't. Boeing spent the R&D
money on the 777, and got their return.

The worth of the MD-11 didn't quite fall to scrap value, however, as the
three-engined approach made it suitable for those who move high weight a
medium distance - the cargo airlines. And so FedEx, UPS, and some others would
pay reasonable secondhand prices for them.

The original buyers thus sold them off, and bought 777s instead. Yes, there
were a range of reasons. But in the background, quietly, the Chief Pilot is
telling the Chairman of the Board "that thing is an accident waiting to happen
for us". As, I regret to say, the cargo airlines continue to find out. I
suspect the airline's insurers had something to say as well.

McDD just didn't get their Return on Investment, and the same thing happened
with the MD90 and MD95, two more adaptations done on the cheap. Out of cash,
they had to be absorbed by Boeing, and their vast assembly plant area in Long
Beach is now condos and shopping malls. The most extraordinary part about this
is that HS got himself accepted and pushed up to the very top of the Boeing
hierarchy, where his extreme cost cutting some years ago did the same again -
this time going for a real all-whiz new design, new materials, plus all
subcontracted out (to the low bidder of course) rather than use the
traditional workforce, etc,etc. Everything different, all at once. Roll on
several years from his time there, and we all know what's happened to that new
Boeing type, don't we ...... ?

As was said 20-30 years ago : "The best aircraft would be - designed by
Lockheed, built by Boeing, sales & markeing team from McDonnell Douglas".
Notable which of the three skills eventually came out on top.

~~~
jabl
I read something similar in connection with the 737MAX saga; when Boeing
bought McDD the McDD bean counter MBA management culture took over, with
catastrophic results.

------
fouc
TL;DR: It didn't. Some guy realized customizing pilot cockpits would save
lives. User Friendliness was thus discovered.

~~~
mc32
The connection is not tenuous.

Basically as you say planes were designed to be user friendly --vs insisting
on the user/pilot becoming an expert. New recruits were given comparatively
little training before going on missions. That same viewpoint was implemented
in Macs where the computer accommodated the user rather than have a new user
get to know arcane systems.

