Piloting an airplane
— October 29 2009
I studied aerospace engineering because airplanes are an amazing mix of every possible high-tech industry: Advanced composites, radars, fluid mechanics, electronics, economy, operating systems…
But it didn’t come until later that I noticed that airplanes were also about design for human interaction. The pilot is constantly overwhelmed with information, and it’s important to let him focus on what’s important.
Airplanes can predict, more or less, which maneuvers are potentially dangerous for the flight and prevent you from doing them. Manufacturers choose to do this in different ways:
- Alert whenever you’re doing something dangerous, but still do it. Which is potentially dangerous.
- Other would prevent the pilot from doing the dangerous maneuver, thus limiting his ability to act against common sense in difficult situations.
- Others chose a smarter approach, based in active materials: The control level, which is usually easy to move, becomes stiffer when you’re trying to do something dangerous.
The latter is another great example of suggesting over forcing. We could draw an analogy with web apps. When typing a field that is too long, or a password too weak, pages can:
- Tell you it’s wrong, but still accept it, which is noisy.
- Reject it and force you writing the required length. Which leads to hard to remember passwords.
- Suggest with proper design how long something should be.
I can also see how cars could use this, not to limit speed but to suggest it’s not right to go above the speed limit by making the pedal harder to push beyond a limit. This way, if you are in an life emergency you will still be able to override this behaviour.
For Teambox 2, we chose permissive lengths over artificial restrictions. Although it is true that many may benefit from an very clear length limit in their data, if that’s the goal.
