Poor Design? Blame The User!
Amrit Williams, 23/02/2010, posted in "Analysis"
Amrit Williams has over 18 years of experience in information technology, security, and risk management and is currently the Chief Technology Officer of BigFix, an enterprise systems and security ...more info
Amrit Williams has over 18 years of experience in information technology, security, and risk management and is currently the Chief Technology Officer of BigFix, an enterprise systems and security management solution provider. Amrit has held a variety of engineering, management and consulting positions prior to joining BigFIx. Most recently, Amrit was a research director in the Information Security and Risk Research Practice at Gartner, where he covered vulnerability and threat management, network security, security information and event management, risk management, and secure application development. Previously, Williams was a director of engineering for nCircle Network Security, and undertook leadership positions at Consilient, Network Associates, and McAfee Associates, where he worked to develop market leading security and systems management solutions. ...less info
As I was traveling through Canada last week I was struck by an article in the Globe and Mail – “Track designers defend Whistler course” – in which the designers of the Winter Sliding Centre suggest that the unfortunate accident that resulted in the death of Georgian athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili was caused by human error and not any negligence of the track designers themselves (here) and (here)
Mr. Baranowski said he still can’t quite understand how Mr. Kumaritashvili lost control of his sled on the final turn during training Friday and catapulted off into the pole. He’s convinced the track was not unsafe and that all proper safety measures were in place.
“It’s human error,” he said. “It’s an extraordinary accident.”
Mr. Baranowski also helped build the track for the Salt Lake City Games in 2002 and says the Whistler track is faster in part because some of the curves are steeper. The steepest have a 20-per-cent grade, compared to 15 per cent at Salt Lake City.
“At every Olympic Games they try to make these tracks more competitive and more interesting,” Mr. Baranowski said. “But once the speed creeps up, everything changes.”
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we experienced similar events as a detour was added to the Bay Bridge as part of a seismic retrofit project. The detour included a dangerous S-curve which requires commuters to slow down from 50mph to 40mph. The S-curve has resulted in dozens of accidents, impacting tens of thousands of commuters and resulted in the death of a truck driver that plunged off the side of the bridge in November of last year. It has been determined that the driver had only been traveling 10mph above the posted speed limit. As is the case with the Olympic tragedy the designers of the Bay Bridge S-Curve have determined there is no fundamental flaw in their design and in all cases the accidents were a result of “human error”. (here)
“We don’t believe the roadway design is the issue,” Cross said. “There’s just a small percentage of people who choose to ignore the posted speed limit.”
Caltrans also believes the problem is drivers’ speed rather than the S-curve itself, agency spokesman Bob Haus said.
“Nothing is wrong with the design,” he contended. “Drivers simply need to slow down. Every single accident has been the result of speed.”
These are terrible tragedies and I do not wish to make light of them, but they highlight a material flaw in our collective thinking regarding design. We can easily apply this attitude of “human error” to the technology area as well.
We design systems that enable users to negatively impact their productivity and experience. We develop consumer grade wireless access points but ship with security disabled, we deliver web browsers that are tightly integrated into the OS so that user actions on the Internet impact the underlying OS. We enable ease of use over controls, we tend towards UI polish over architectural integrity. In many cases the user is left to fend for themselves based on poor design choices and when that happens we cry “human error. Ultimately we are designing our own fate.
Subscribe via RSS or via email
