As Far As I Can Tell

Today in the New York Times is an article entitled Wanted by the Police: A Good Interface that details the failures of a new in-car computer system in San Jose. It’s a classic case of bad design with little research and no testing with end users. Good interface design is particularly important for such specialized systems and brought to light here because cumbersome interactions could be a life or death matter.

There’s a telling paragraph near the beginning:

At the heart of the dispute is the question of how much the technology itself is to blame, how much is a training problem and how much can be attributed to the predictable pains associated with learning something new.

While any specialized system requires some training it’s inappropriate to blame the users when it so clearly wasn’t researched or tested. It’s a classic situation of blaming everything on “human error”. That may be true, but the humans in question for this case are the designers, not the users.