In some industries usability can mean the difference between life and death. In ‘Everyday usability: Why people don’t use things’ I looked at why some products are a success (the printed book) and why some fail (Edison’s phonograph), but what has usability got to do with tanks, helicopters and fighter jets?

Preparing for the first gulf war, American troops ran war games in the deserts of their homeland. To add to the realism, as well as combatants role-playing enemy soldiers, US helicopters were ‘dressed up’ to resemble Iraqi vehicles. This simulation was later blamed for some of the ‘friendly fire’ among American forces: The troops had been trained to recognise their own helicopters, albeit ‘dressed up’, as enemy craft. While it was the exercise that was flawed, the soldiers did exactly what they were trained to do and destroyed helicopters that looked like the ones they recognised as enemy craft.

Usability is concerned with understanding human behaviour and psychology and ensuring that websites, processes, products – whatever a human has to interact with – is usable to its highest degree. We can tweak websites and improve on them as we go, but when someone’s life depends on usability, some serious research needs to be done.

If you can understand the how people work, fit what you’re creating to how people can best use it. Bodge it and there will always be mistakes – thankfully for most of us, these mistakes are usually only minor irritations.

Recently I went to Tankfest 2009 at the UK’s Tank Museum, next to Bovingdon Camp, where British soldiers are taught how to drive tracked vehicles. Apart from the sheer boyish enjoyment of seeing massive rumbly trundly things and indulge my four year old son in the pleasure sitting in the tank driver’s seat, there was one tiny almost overlooked feature that caught my professional eye.

In old style tanks, the Commander would kick the driver in the back of his chair in different positions depending on whether he wanted him to start, stop, turn left or right. A nice little bit of non-verbal communication, but hardly what you’d expect from Her Majesty’s Finest in the 21st century. 

These days the Commander of a Challenger 2 tank now communicates with his crew (driver, gunner and loader) by computer. Instead of a clunky keyboard and mouse combo, the Commander instead uses a handset almost identical to the Xbox 360 game console handset. Why? Games companies have spent a lot of time and money finding the most ergonomically designed controllers and the military have borrowed this learning to make their systems as usable as possible. As ‘the Nintendo generation goes to war’ (thanks @Haydens30), these interfaces are also familiar to the incoming recruits, so why make them learn something new and less usable?

@fulnic also tells me that this handset interface is also being use in unmanned spy planes.

Anyone remember the Robin Williams film ‘Toys’?

If this looks like playing to a degenerated generation, I disagree. It’s about understanding human strengths and weaknesses and working with and around them. The US Air Force found that under combat stress, fighter pilots ignored alarms alerting them to an incoming missile. They tried sounds and flashing lights, but again the pilots learned to ignore these in the same was we ignore gaudy advertising banners on webpages (banner blindness). The only thing that got the pilots attention every single time was a child’s voice in their earphones saying “Help me Daddy! Help me Daddy!” – a story that still gives me goose bumps.

Understand the machine, play to its strengths and not to its weaknesses.

The Long Dog

Tags: case study, research, UCD, usability

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 00:01 and is filed under User-Centred Design, research, usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.