Modern touchscreen applications leave old mechanical controls behind. And it's not always for the better. In this case, lives were lost...
In the early morning on August 21, 2017, the US Navy destroyer John S McCain was in the Singapore Strait – one of the busiest waterways in the world – inbound for a port call in Singapore. Through a lot of confusion about the ship's controls, the ship started veering port. Within about three minutes, another ship had struck the starboard side of the John S McCain. The impact breached the hull in a berthing compartment, and 10 sailors were killed.
Recently, the National Transportation Safety Board released an accident report for the incident. There were many factors that led to this unfortunate circumstance, from fatigue to a lack of training, but one thing that stood out was the touch-screen controls for thrust and steering.
The NTSB report suggests that had mechanical throttles been present, the helmsmen would have likely been able to feel the problems in steering and correct for them much more quickly. They note that mechanical throttles are preferred because “they provide both immediate and tactile feedback to the operator.”
During a keynote speech at the American Society of Naval Engineers’ annual Fleet Maintenance and Modernization Symposium, Program Executive Officer for Ships Rear Adm. Bill Galinis said as a result of innovation and a desire to incorporate new technology, “we got away from the physical throttles, and that was probably the number-one feedback from the fleet – they said, just give us the throttles that we can use.”
“When we started getting the feedback from the fleet from the Comprehensive Review effort – it was SEA 21 (NAVSEA’s surface ship lifecycle management organization) that kind of took the lead on doing some fleet surveys and whatnot – it was really eye-opening. And it goes into the, in my mind, ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’ category."
In our modern world, there's a constant push towards new technology and innovations. This is often a good thing, but there are also times when new technology is deployed because that's what everyone else is doing, and not enough thought is put into the 'why'. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Take the time to better understand what the underlying issues are. Work out the weaknesses of the current systems and find ways to modernise and improve them. But also pay attention to the stuff that works well in the current system and try to factor that into the new design. Just give us the throttles that we can use.
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This was a big project.
It started small enough. A system to print shelf tickets for a group of pharmacies. Of course, that had its own technical challenges. Not least of which was printing from a browser in such a way that it would be consistent with pre-printed and/or pre-perforated paper. We ended up developing an unobtrusive background application for windows that would handle communication with the printer, and a separate web system for creating the print jobs.
This expanded a lot. We built an entire visual editor for printible tickets with multiple dynamic labels and layouts of those labels. We also expanded the management side of the system to handle promotional periods and other forms of marketing. The idea became for marketing departments to create and upload assets and product pricing details, and the stores just had to log on and print what was relevant to them.
With nearly a thousand stores using the system, there was a lot of iteration around the UI/UX of the system, especially about making life easier for the store users. We also started handling support tickets and calls (myself included) in order to better assist the stores. This helped me put an emphesis on the UX design, as I got to know the kinds of people that were using the system (and designing things so I had less support tickets to attend do :P ).
Before I left, I was part of the management of the product as a whole, and was working on a big redesign and re-branding. Partially in an attempt to simplify the entire system, and to reach out to more non-pharmacy retail chains and outlets.