The article is titled, How the Dumb Design of a WW II Plane Led to the Mackintosh but in reality it's how we began designing products built for us imperfect humans and the two psychologists that started it all.
After WWII Paul Fitts and his colleague Alfonse Chapanis (one of the fathers of ergonomics) were given the records of all the unexplained, actually listed as pilot error B17 crashes during the war to study. Most expected they would arrive at the same conclusions, pilot error but what they eventually discovered wasn't pilot error but instead was design error as Chapanis put it.
Taking into account human nature, especially under stress and the fact that controls for different functions in the aircraft looked and felt exactly the same it was no wonder so many unexplained accidents occurred.
Chapanis eventually designed controls that looked and more importantly felt different, patterns that were designed to be more "natural".
How the Dumb Design of a WWII Plane Led to the Macintosh
After WWII Paul Fitts and his colleague Alfonse Chapanis (one of the fathers of ergonomics) were given the records of all the unexplained, actually listed as pilot error B17 crashes during the war to study. Most expected they would arrive at the same conclusions, pilot error but what they eventually discovered wasn't pilot error but instead was design error as Chapanis put it.
Taking into account human nature, especially under stress and the fact that controls for different functions in the aircraft looked and felt exactly the same it was no wonder so many unexplained accidents occurred.
Chapanis eventually designed controls that looked and more importantly felt different, patterns that were designed to be more "natural".
Instead, designing better machines meant figuring how people acted without thinking, in the fog of everyday life, which might never be perfect. You couldn’t assume humans to be perfectly rational sponges for training. You had to take them as they were: distracted, confused, irrational under duress. Only by imagining them at their most limited could you design machines that wouldn’t fail them.
How the Dumb Design of a WWII Plane Led to the Macintosh