<story><title>Navy’s flawed technology set the USS John McCain up for disaster</title><url>https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crmrc114</author><text>In a panic people get tunnel vision. When you design HMI&amp;#x27;s for a living you have to consider. If my brother, sister, grandmother was using this system during an emergency could we guide them to make the right decisions.&lt;p&gt;The fact that the prop controls could be split but the UI would not gray out the sliders on the screens that did not have control is a poor user interface design choice. If the controls only appeared &amp;quot;active&amp;quot; on the screen they were transferred too this could have made things much more simple.&lt;p&gt;The fact that the mushroom button for emergency steering yanked control to wherever it was pressed- this should have displayed a red on black box. Emergency Override called from X Station.&lt;p&gt;The issues with the navigation system are a whole other bag of worms- who knows what the mess was there.&lt;p&gt;Disclosure, I have done HMI design and install in production systems for manufacturing, chemical and warehousing operations. I have never built anything for a ship or vehicle. So I may be speaking total stupid to someone in that industry. I would love to hear someone from that market sector drop in and talk about how or why the HMI was setup like this.&lt;p&gt;Sounds like this system was sub-contracted to the lowest bidder and pushed out without enough testing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The fact that the prop controls could be split but the UI would not gray out the sliders on the screens that did not have control is a poor user interface design choice. If the controls only appeared &amp;quot;active&amp;quot; on the screen they were transferred too this could have made things much more simple.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This reminds me of the Airbus control sticks, where the systemd &lt;i&gt;averages&lt;/i&gt; the two inputs if e.g. one pilot pushes forward while the other pulls back. There is a warning but it can be easily ignored, as happened on &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Air_France_Flight_447&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Air_France_Flight_447&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;p&gt;Also, I suspect there may have been at least one person who raised the idea of disabling&amp;#x2F;graying out the controls if they&amp;#x27;re inactive, but it was not listened to or even actively opposed because &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s not in the spec&amp;quot; and the one who brought it up didn&amp;#x27;t have the power to do anything about it. I&amp;#x27;ve worked in environments like that (thankfully not for long) enough to know that these big and highly bureaucratic projects will tend to have lots of &amp;quot;lack of common sense&amp;quot; problems, either because no one bothers to actually think about what they&amp;#x27;re trying to do, or the division of labour was so fine that no one could. Lots of process, lots of specification meetings, lots of cargo-culting dogma, but no real thought put into anything. The fact that such developer positions are treated as disposable and easily replaceable probably adds to the problem too.</text></comment>
<story><title>Navy’s flawed technology set the USS John McCain up for disaster</title><url>https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crmrc114</author><text>In a panic people get tunnel vision. When you design HMI&amp;#x27;s for a living you have to consider. If my brother, sister, grandmother was using this system during an emergency could we guide them to make the right decisions.&lt;p&gt;The fact that the prop controls could be split but the UI would not gray out the sliders on the screens that did not have control is a poor user interface design choice. If the controls only appeared &amp;quot;active&amp;quot; on the screen they were transferred too this could have made things much more simple.&lt;p&gt;The fact that the mushroom button for emergency steering yanked control to wherever it was pressed- this should have displayed a red on black box. Emergency Override called from X Station.&lt;p&gt;The issues with the navigation system are a whole other bag of worms- who knows what the mess was there.&lt;p&gt;Disclosure, I have done HMI design and install in production systems for manufacturing, chemical and warehousing operations. I have never built anything for a ship or vehicle. So I may be speaking total stupid to someone in that industry. I would love to hear someone from that market sector drop in and talk about how or why the HMI was setup like this.&lt;p&gt;Sounds like this system was sub-contracted to the lowest bidder and pushed out without enough testing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>magduf</author><text>The thing you&amp;#x27;re completely missing here is that these systems are built by military contractors, so it really shouldn&amp;#x27;t be too surprising that they have such awful UI.  These companies do not make &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; commercial products (except Boeing).  Their real strength in the marketplace is being really skilled at acquiring valuable government contracts, and being a big enough company (thanks to history and inertia) to actually win these contracts and deliver on them (even if it&amp;#x27;s late and the product is poor, though it meets all the specs).  These companies would not survive if they had to sell their products to consumers.  The negative reviews on Amazon would kill them quickly.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;I have never built anything for a ship or vehicle. So I may be speaking total stupid to someone in that industry.&lt;p&gt;You don&amp;#x27;t need to have experience building ship control systems to know this stuff is stupid.  You probably drive a car, right?  Can you imagine a car with UIs anything like this?  If military contractors were doing car UIs, the roads would be a bloodbath.</text></comment>