Two Different Examples of Ergonomics in IT

 Ergonomics can make or break a product, especially in IT. All producers and manufacturers should strive to make their product user-friendly and enable the user to easily and logically use their device. In this blog I am going talk about one example of bad ergonomics that lead to innocent people dying and a good one that saves millions of lives every time it detects something.

Towards the end of Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the United States and Iran were in an undeclared war and the USS Vincennes was in the middle of a confrontation with Iranian gunboats in the Persian Gulf when it accidentally shot down a civilian aircraft mistaking it for an enemy aircraft. So why didn't the US ship's radar system have some kind of method to separate hostile and civilian planes? In fact it did, but it was really bad...

So you know in RTS or MOBA games where you click on a unit and it shows information about the specific unit and it's statistics. Well, the USS Vincennes had a similar system, but not as complicated. To track an aircraft they had to click on the aircraft, but to listen to their radio signals they had to click on the same aircraft again with a different cursor. It was really ineffective and the whole system definitely needed an upgrade. You could even sometimes forget which object you were highlighting and that is just what happened then.

So the operator of the radar detection forgot to move the second cursor, which was already listening in on Iranian F-14 aircraft and presuming that the incoming aircraft was the F-14. Matters were only made worse by the second part of the radar that displayed the altitude of the aircraft. Usually it is not enough to shoot down a plane by only knowing if it's a combat or civilian aircraft, but the altitude system had also really bad ergonomics. The altitude could only be checked to see what altitude the plane was at a specific time and later the operator would check again to see if the plane was descending or ascending. So the operator concluded that the aircraft was descending on the USS Vincennes and the civilian aircraft was accidentally shot down.

That story really shows the effects of a very bad and definitely not ergonomically built system, but there are also systems that are very well built that save lives. I am talking about super computers that detect natural hazards.

So the first objective of such a super computer is to obviously alert of the incoming storm, earthquake or other natural disaster. They even predict where exactly the storm would touch down, how high the waters would rise during the storm and how the flooding would impact the community. But since super computers can store and analyze previous natural hazards, the also collect a lot of data that allows them to create models of upcoming disasters. That helps the system to visualize complex information for the scientists and make them understand exactly what is going to happen. In 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred in the Mexican Gulf, visualizations of the oil spill forecasts helped direct U.S. Coast Guard ships to the thickest plumes of oil, and, in the worst cases, enabled emergency teams to protect property and ecosystems along the coast.

So in conclusion, ergonomics of an IT device is very important, because if the device has bad ergonomics, it could be rendered useless and even harmful in the long run.

References:

  • https://www.huffpost.com/entry/6-ways-supercomputer-help-prevent-natural-hazards-from_b_584b0131e4b0016e5043037f
  • https://www.cracked.com/article_19776_6-disasters-caused-by-poorly-designed-user-interfaces.html

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