At Artefact we invest heavily in user research. We believe that in order to build better products and better experiences, you need to have a deep understanding of your user, their needs and their situation. To this end, we’ll try and observe users in their own environment to understand the nuances of behavior and context that may inform the end design. If we do a good job, the end product is intuitive and forgiving of mistakes.
In the world of aviation, a well designed experience is not only desirable, but essential. When you have a failure of the system at a thousand feet, the consequences are often fatal. And while the systems continue to evolve and improve over time, there is still one element that can undo it all: the human being. Case in point is the following clip of a trainee pilot in a Cessna 182 during a check-ride:
The clip is fascinating on a couple of levels. First of all is the beeping; this is an auditory alarm to indicate that there is a problem with the system, which in this case is the failure to lower the landing gear. In the video it is so loud that the trainee pilot and the instructor have to shout to be heard over the alarm sound. Secondly, this is a plane with three people on board and not one of them noticed or responded to the alarm (you have to wonder what is going through the mind of the person with the camera). It is not until the fuselage grinds along the tarmac do they realize they have made a really big mistake. And this isn’t the domain of the hobbyist in a small plane, for even the big boys commit serious errors relying upon similar systems. Here’s a photo of a C-17 after trying to land on the runway at Bagram Air Field outside of Kabul, Afghanistan. They too forgot to put the gear down.
But as designers, what can we learn from this? The first to really understand user context. In the example above, the stresses of flight are considerable, and the concentration required during take-off and landing is extreme. For the people in the 182, the focus is so singular that all other stimulus (such as audio) are essentially blocked from consciousness. When designing a system such as a cockpit, the user’s state of mind needs to be considered and accommodated. And as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his latest book Outliers, there are also cultural considerations where a connection is drawn between Korean attitudes around the notion of respect and their higher than average number of plane crashes:
It’s probably the chapter nearly the end of Outliers where I talk about plane crashes. How good a pilot is, it turns out, has a lot to do with where that pilot is from—that is, the culture he or she was raised in. I was actually stunned by how strong the connection is between culture and crashes, and it’s something that I would never have dreamed was true, in a million years.
What could have been done differently in designing this system? There have been developments to reduce the load on the pilot through assistance technologies such as auto-pilot, check-lists and redundancies. For the specific issue of ensuring landing gear is deployed, there have been attempts to automate the system so that gear is automatically lowered when the throttle is eased or the plane drops to a certain speed. But the solutions raised new problems whereby the gear is deployed inadvertantly causing a whole new set of problems.
I think what this teaches us is that no matter how well you design a product or a system or a service and how much you strive to make it utterly foolproof, someone will manage to be defeated by it. Even with all of the technology, most planes still need a human being at the controls, each bringing their own limitations to the table. It is not the failure of the system or the design but rather a failure of the user; the vast majority of plane crashes are attributable to pilot error. However, these types of incidents should serve as a startling reminder that the users don’t always behave the way we expect, and that we can never truly design a user’s experience.