(continued from Usability and Dangerous Technology, Part 2 )
It seems clear why we should be concerned in applying usability techniques to potentially dangerous technology, but why on earth should we make inherently dangerous stuff more usable? Why should we make it easier to hurt and kill people?
I asked this question a few years ago, a bit naively, in an e-mail conversation with Jerry Weinberg. He pointed out that, if you choose to work at all on such technologies, shouldn’t they be as safe to use as possible? Shouldn’t your design minimize errors in use so as not to accidentally harm unintended targets? This conversation, simple as it may seem, radically refocussed my understanding of usability’s relation to safety in systems.
I now fundamentally believe that the most important thing you can do to improve safety is to improve usability. If your design is easy to learn and remember, improves the user’s productivity, clearly supports the work, reduces user mistakes, and allows the user to stay immersed in the purpose of his or her work, the system will be safer for all concerned.
Now, contrast that with calls for changes to dangerous technology to add guards and constraints to provide more safety. Unless particularly well designed, most technological guards and protections will create additional opportunities for error, block the flow of the work, and interfere with making life-or-death decisions at the exact point that those decisions must be made.
Do you want to have to key in a password in order to open an airline cabin door for a doctor to tend to a pilot whose anurysm has just burst? (I’ve read many calls for more password protected access to plane cockpits and other areas in airline security.)
Would you rather a plane be unable to take evasive action by moving into urban airspace to avoid a collision with another plane? (One article I read said that planes should be hard-wired to not allow flying over cities.)
Notice, however, that I do allow for such protection to be included if it is \ particularly well designed.\ Protections can be done well, such that they don’t interfere with work. The key is whether the user, in the normal case, has to interact with the protections at all in order to do their work.
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