Thomas Borchert wrote:
I find that those without an engineering
background find it counterintuitive and need a lot of time to get used
to it.

If I may: So what? Who says things in life have to be easy or
"intuitive"?

Wow, you sound like an engineer.

Who says it has to be easy or intuitive? Well, the customer. He's the
one who matters. In the software industry (at least the successful
parts of it) software is tested by intended end-users. When the
software doesn't behave the way they expect, you don't retrain them -
you rewrite the software. Of course the developers always bitch about
this, but it's not a grey area. The customers are right and the
developers are wrong. Unfortunately, in this FAA-driven environment,
the customer doesn't matter.

A GPS does very complex things. So it is complex to use.

I said the same thing when I was told to make the doppler non-invasive
flowmeter simple to use. I was told that it wasn't acceptable, and to
make it easy to use. Seven years later, it's still the industry
leader. You CAN make a device that does complex things easy and
intuitive to use. It's just a lot of work.

Is
any of those people you teach really of the opinion that a CDI or an ADF
are more "intutitive" than a moving map? Yeah, right...

Yes. They are. But not to an engineer.

Michael