The Deadly Consequences of Poor UI
In today’s digital age, User Interface (UI) design plays a pivotal role in shaping our interactions with technology. While often seen as mere conveniences or annoyances, the repercussions of poorly-executed UX/UI design can extend far beyond frustration — they can, in fact, lead to catastrophic consequences, even death.
Going from the mildly irritating to the catastrophic over a series of articles, I’ll aim to highlight some of the most egregious examples of bad design, starting with examples in the transport sector.
To begin with the mildly irritating, BMW’s iDrive system garnered wide-ranging opprobrium for its overly complex menu structures and distracting interface. Drivers found themselves navigating through layers of menus just to perform basic tasks like adjusting the air conditioning, posing significant risks of distraction and accidents.
It was eventually deduced that over 700 of the vehicle’s functions (!) were to be operated by iDrive — how BMW ever expected people to get to grips with that back in the noughties, I will never know.
It’s also worth considering the case of the early iterations of the Toyota Prius, infamous for their unintuitive brake design and poorly thought-out gearbox. The shift from conventional braking systems to regenerative braking, and the design they chose to represent this in-car, resulted in a confusing experience for drivers, leading to numerous accidents being reported, with some proving fatal.
The gearbox is also a classic issue of counterintuitive design — pushing the stick forward in order to engage reverse and vice versa led to many drivers, particularly ones coming from previously owning cars from a variety of brands, crashing when they otherwise wouldn’t have.
Fiat’s flawed Chrysler gearbox is another example of this seemingly benign issue actually turning deadly. Anton Yelchin, the Star Trek actor, was pinned against his front gate by his car after he had exited the vehicle with it still in neutral. Driver error most would say, however, this was just one symptom of a much wider issue.
The FCA (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) designed gearbox differed from a traditional automatic gearbox in that it would snap back to a “neutral” position regardless of which gear option was selected. This, coupled with the fact that the handbrake (or parking brake) would not be automatically engaged if the driver door opened whilst the vehicle was not in the “park” gear, meant that it was linked to over 100 accidents before being finally recalled by the company.
Turning to the slightly more deadly instances of interface failure, when the USS John S. McCain collided with a Liberian tanker in 2017, 10 sailors tragically lost their lives due to their sleeping compartments flooding as a result of the impact — all of which can be chalked up to an awkwardly-placed checkbox.
Up at the bridge of the ship, where sailors were manning the Integrated Bridge and Navigation System (IBNS), the commanding officer noticed the helmsman “having difficulty maintaining course” through the narrow Strait of Malacca with the throttle and steering coupled at the time, so he ordered the control of the throttle to be shifted to the lee helm, to the right of the helmsman’s console.
He had, however, inadvertently switched control of all steering functions to this station, resulting in the rudder shifting to a default position and causing the ship to drift quickly off course in a narrow, busy passage of water.
At this point a “loss of steering” was declared by the helmsman and, in the commotion, the CO ordered ordered a slowing of all engines, but the lee helmsman only slowed the port (left) throttle as the controls were not “linked” due to the aforementioned checkbox being unchecked on-screen.
This put the ship on an immediate collision course with a Liberian merchant vessel, and by the time this discrepancy was noticed it was too late to prevent the collision, resulting in multiple injuries, losses of life, and untold millions of dollars in damage.
The US Navy later claimed the officers were “improperly trained” and did not follow protocol, however an independent report into the incident quotes a senior Naval officer as stating, “The IBNS has no place on the bridge of a U.S. destroyer. It’s not designed to have the control that you need to navigate a warship”, and in an interview with a former Navy technician who had worked on the system, they define it as being “flawed”, “unstable” and suffering “multiple and cascading failures regularly”.
The fact that the Integrated Bridge and Navigation System (IBNS) was retrofitted to each ship over a period of years, during which time the system was changed and updated numerous times by the parent company (Northrop), also contributed to this disaster.
The USS John S. McCain was the first ship in the 7th Fleet — which is the largest armada in the world at the moment — to receive it, and this only happened in 2016 — eight years after Northrop won their contract with the Navy initially.
It’s therefore no wonder that the crew, who may or may not have been exposed to the IBNS on other ships, had little control over the vessel once things started to go wrong. In fact, whether they had or hadn’t had experience with the system wouldn’t have mattered due to it changing interface regularly.
This is yet another example of how badly designed user interfaces, and user interfaces of any type, can lead directly to disaster.
For some better known examples, we look to the aviation industry, one which has also witnessed the dire consequences of subpar UI design. Air Inter’s 1992 flight from Lyon to Strasbourg was going smoothly right up until it was circling Strasbourg airport awaiting confirmation of which runway to land on. Levelled out at an altitude of 5,000m, the crew began their final approach and put the flight path angle to 3.3 degrees, or so they thought.
The flight path angle (FPA) and vertical speed (V/S) indicators both occupy the same screen space depending on which is selected. The crew therefore inadvertently selected the V/S value instead of the FPA value, leading the aircraft to descend at 3,300 feet per min and crash into the mountains 10.5 nautical miles outside of Strasbourg airport.
As you can see from the photo below, the difference between two values on the same screen are separated by a single decimal point.
The Air France Flight 447 disaster also serves as a chilling reminder. In this tragic incident, the aircraft’s pitot tubes, crucial for measuring airspeed, froze due to icing. What led to the crash was the aircraft’s UI, as it failed to provide clear indications or alerts to the pilots once this had happened, leading them to believe the issue was a different one altogether. The result was an air crash with no survivors.
Similarly, the Helios Airways Flight 522 incident revealed the lethal implications of inadequate cockpit interface design and counterintuitive controls. Due to some previous complaints from both passengers and crew, a check of the cabin pressurisation was done before take off at Larnaca, Cyprus. In order to perform this check, the ground engineer had to flick the pressurisation controls to manual instead of auto.
This was then missed by the flight crew prior to and during its onward journey to Athens due to unclear cockpit controls and, to add insult to injury, the alert noise for cabin depressurisation was identical to that of a takeoff configuration warning, which is what the crew assumed they were being alerted to when the alarm sounded.
The result was everyone onboard suffering from hypoxia, leading to a ghost flight which eventually crashed into the Athenian mountains after running out of fuel.
The examples above emphasise the imperative of prioritising user-centric design principles across all industries. Whatever the real-world use case for it, usability should never be sacrificed for complexity or novelty. Complicated menus, convoluted controls, and unnecessary features only serve to overwhelm users and increase the likelihood of errors.
Thorough user research is key to understanding needs for intuitive interfaces, especially in high-stakes settings. Clear and concise feedback mechanisms are crucial as well — whether it’s visual alerts, auditory cues, or tactile feedback, systems must provide users with immediate and unambiguous information to facilitate swift and informed decision-making.
By embracing user-centric design principles, conducting thorough research, and prioritising simplicity and clarity, we can mitigate the risks posed by poorly designed interfaces and pave the way for a safer, more intuitive future. In the end, the true measure of success lies not in flashy features or technological prowess, but in the lives saved and the tragedies averted through well-executed design.
