In the current situation when many parts of the world are under lockdown and quarantine, we all are trying to keep ourselves safe and at the same time continue doing what we were doing earlier from home.
I thought for next few weeks, I will share some interesting things from the books I have read which may also be fascinating for anyone who reads this and also trigger curiosity inside you.
Today I will share from the book: USER FRIENDLY — How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work and Play — By Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant
This book traces the history of what we call today as User Experience design, how it evolved to what it is now.This book gives a lot of interesting information and stories of how user experience design evolved the way it is, but what I found most curious is the story about Three-mile Island (TMI) accident.
For those who are not aware, in a nuclear power plant located at TMI, Pennsylvania, USA where a cooling malfunction caused part of the core to melt in the #2 reactor. The TMI-2 reactor was destroyed. You can google and get all the details of the accident as I will not be going to specifics.
Post the accident, one of the investigation committees was headed by Don Norman who invented the term User Experience. In his interview for the book, Don explains what he found out during his investigation. He says the control-room which is one of the key components of any plant and for that matter, as critical as a nuclear plant was till then designed as an afterthought. To quote from the book: “thanks to the catastrophically bad control-room design, the operators were unable to understand what was going wrong. They continued making bad choices as the plant and men who operated it were not in sync. The plant was not designed for bad decisions that men can take, and men couldn’t understand what the plant was doing in a crisis.”
There was no clear logic in the way the control panels were designed. In the same control panel, there were fourteen different meanings for red and eleven different meanings for green. The lights were not grouped towards any logical action set. The plant valve alert and the elevator alerts were next to each other.
Now you must be wondering, “Ok what is interesting in this…many of us are using enterprise systems that are as badly designed as this :).”
Apart from the badly designed control-room, there was lot of chaos around the reporting of this accident in the media, with an erroneous report from Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that there was an explosive hydrogen bubble inside the reactor. Hell broke loose in the media, with breaking news splashing all over US TV stations interrupting their regular programs. People around the nuclear site were being asked to evacuate resulting in panic around the country. President Jimmy Carter visited the accident site within a few days to calm the public and also to explain what happened. However, didn’t ease the panic that people felt due to conflicting reports.
Here comes the most interesting part; 12 days before the TMI accident, a movie was released. The title of the movie was The China Syndrome, which was about the cover up in a nuclear power plant during a meltdown.
The movie’s title came from an urban legend that if there is a meltdown in an American reactor it can bore a path through the earth’s core to China. When the movie was released, the nuclear industry said this was pure fiction and it would never happen.
Within a few weeks, the TMI accident occured. Now this movie fanned the fear of public during the TMI accident and it also resulted in a big box office success. With TMI located in Pennsylvania, one prophetic line from The China Syndrome stated that the nuclear disaster in that movie could create a wasteland as large as “the size of Pennsylvania.” The panic that was created all over the USA is well-documented. Though it happened in an era where there was no social media, the country had a large number of TV networks that acted similarly to the current social media in bringing anything interesting across the living rooms of USA quickly.
Despite the situation being brought under control in 3 days and without any fatality from the accident, the incident never went away from public memory. Frightening theories were proposed and were given prominence in the news media. Everyday media reported something new about this and public confidence in the ability of US organizations to build nuclear power plants started to dwindle. Finally the NRC of the US, announced that there would not be any new nuclear power plants built till all the necessary safe guards were in place. This sounded death knell to the nuclear power industry in the USA, as no new nuclear power plant was approved till 2012. Many experts say with that, the production of the safest, cheapest and most reliable source of renewable energy remains forever shrouded in fear.
This accident also triggered the need for intuitive interfaces between man and machine and led to the world that we are living in with our smartphones and apps.
