Glass cockpit hard to read

Phil writes:

That makes me wonder how the designers of EFIS displays choose their
designs. Are the designs based on research or are they just the
personal preferences of the designer?

My guess is that the expensive commercial stuff in airliners is the product of
fairly extensive studies into ergonomy, whereas the inexpensive stuff sold for
small aircraft has not been subjected to that kind of study, since it's not
required for certification and it's very expensive. That's why the
inexpensive stuff looks so much more like a video game and so much less like a
cockpit.

So we are all using a keyboard that forces us to type more slowly than we could
with an optimal keyboard. The Dvorak keyboard was designed to
eliminate this problem. But hardly anyone uses it because we have all
been taught to type on the old QWERTY keyboard.

The most recent studies I've seen on the Dvorak indicate that it actually
isn't any faster than a QWERTY keyboard. It turns out that the brain adapts
very well to whatever layout is used, and quickly gets up to speed.

More evidence of this can be seen in the way some people type on their
Blackberries or cell phones.

I understand what you are saying. In the software world, designers
try to make each new release more "helpful" than the last. Sometimes
this is good, but mostly I just find it annoying.

The problem is that it can be deadly in aviation, and not just annoying.
Airbus is a classic example of the software-developer syndrome.

The software tries
to guess what you intend to do, and do it for you. If it guesses
right, that's fine. But it seems like it mostly guesses wrong, and
then you just have to un-do what it did. That's not an improvement.

Especially if it doesn't allow you to un-do anything.

This is a serious problem even in ordinary office automation software, but
it's much worse in safety-of-life software.

I recall a study done by Microsoft that showed that a great many people who
ask for new features for the Office product are actually asking for things
that are already there ... they just don't have any way of finding them in the
bloated mess that Office has become.

For this reason, I don't use Office--I spend more time trying to prevent it
from doing things I don't want it to do than I spend accomplishing anything
productive.

I wish they would put more time into designing simple, intuitive user
interfaces so I can more easily tell the program what I want it to
do. That way the program doesn't have to guess.

It's extremely difficult and expensive to design such interfaces. And often
the goal is simply to add features to encourage sales and upgrades, and nobody
really cares about the ergonomy.

As I've said, I see signs of this in the low-end glass cockpits.
Unfortunately it diminishes safety.