A bad user interface can make a website hard to navigate or a software program hard to use. But in the real world of physical things, a bad user interface can have more serious consequences. This article by Adrian Hanft describes how bad design contributed to the collision that killed ten sailors and wrecked a destroyer.
Two years ago a Navy destroyer was ripped open by the nose of a Liberian tanker. Ten sailors were crushed or drowned as their sleeping quarters filled with water after the collision.
At the heart of the tragedy is a single checkbox on a touchscreen. This is the untold story of how bad design caused a crew to lose control of the $1.8 billion John S McCain destroyer and the mystery around how designers manage to avoid blame when their creations cause death and destruction.
Before going any further, I want to make it clear that I am just a civilian piecing together this story from whatever information I can glean from the internet. I have trudged through hundreds of pages of technical documents and dense reports. Much of this documentation is intentionally vague, some of it has been redacted, and all of it has undoubtedly been scrubbed by lawyers and PR professionals. As a result, there are probably errors in my analysis and conjecture. However, with that disclaimer in mind, I believe the following story may be the clearest, most human-readable account of the McCain accident that you will find anywhere. It may also be the first and only public source of real design criticism ever written in the two years since the accident. I am not sure how the responsibility fell to me, but I am happy to describe the role that design played in this tragedy.
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