FJAG said:
Holy Crap. You couldn't design a less user friendly system then this if you set out to do so deliberately.
Most young men these days have an ability to learn and use computer systems but you have to give them the chance to learn properly.
Double fail.
:facepalm:
For context, the ability to set shaft speed via a control console is pretty standard, but typically the bridge setup has a steering wheel for the course, and you control the speed of both shafts (with the same button) at the same time in normal situations. If you unlink the shaft speeds it's for a good reason and you'll have dedicated operators for each.
Also, the 'station in control' that has control over propulsion is generally strictly governed by a hierchical rule set, and most people go with a positive input required to confirm passing it across/down the chain, so shouldn't be confusing.
Sounds like an excellent example of really poor human engineering on the interface and would be a really good case study for software engineers and others. Unfortunately the ones that have the most impact for people hauling in the lessons, and is why the iron ring is a reminder of when engineers messed up and people died from the bridge collapsing.
We actually have a whole cell in DRDC that does human engineering, and looks at things like the interface, and how user friendly it is. Years ago as a SLt sitting around for a course, got to go and play around with a trial version of a CCS. They specifically wanted people with zero experience with the old system and ran us through a few dozen scenarios over a few days to see how easy it was to track targets, sort out friend/foe, and run through the various actions. They had a bunch of different configurations and wanted to know what was easy to use, if anything was confusing, and if there was anything we found awkward or hard to use (including how many drop down menus we had to go through for common tasks). No idea if it amounted to anything, but was pretty interesting, and believe it was also used to highlight specific things that needed to be explained and tried out when training the operators.
Really weird that an organization as big as the USN wouldn't have a similar setup, but from what I am inferring from reading through a number of their BOIs, there are a lot of careerists that are trying to make their mark, and sounds like this was a poorly tested and rolled out piece of kit that someone was probably spearheading to get a tick in the box for 'leading change'. Hopefully they look more into some of the systematic issues underlying why things like this happen, as it sounds like there are some general organizational issues. Maybe cynical though, as I don't see that happening as it would probably target a bunch of the flag ranks and civie executives.
