A part of Apple’s success comes from the simplicity and ease of use of their products, anyone can understand them. Simple things look easy and friendly, but anyone who already tried to do some design – whatever the domain – knows that it’s not easy. There’s a very good quote on that in the book, and it’s not even from Jobs, but from Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian sculptor who once said:
Simplicity is complexity resolved
I find it brilliant, simply. I had these things in mind when I saw a Garmin advert on the backside of a previous edition of the AOPA magazine. A nice cockpit (Beechcraft if I’m correct) with a G600, a GNS530, a GNS430 and a Garmin transponder. The picture was detailed enough, so one could see the stopwatch displayed on the transponder’s LCD screen…
The engineer in me thought “Cool idea, there’s anyway so much electronics in a transponder that fitting a chronograph in that. Then I linked that with the design considerations from the book. Why shall a transponder contain a stopwatch ? By the way, the GNS430 and 530 also have equivalent features. And the G600 as well. I used to fly with ADF receivers that could also be used as stopwatch. Many aircraft also have a dashboard mounted watch with chronograph function.
From a user experience point of view a cockpit is not exactly simple or easy to understand. Electronics, and particularly integrated glass-cockpits, allowed for some standardization, but the overall complexity is still overwhelming. If you’re familiar with the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit, or with any other Garmin unit, you probably eared the term “buttonology” a couple of times, don’t you ? The sole existence of this term proves that despite all their efforts, the design guys at Garmin have not solved the complexity.
I still think that glass cockpits with touch screens will help improving the usability of our cockpits and make them much easier to understand. The Garmin G3000 is certainly a good step in this direction, but the PFD and MFD must also go touch, not just some extra input devices.
Is Steve Jobs gets bored working for Apple and Pixar, I’m sure he could find new challenges and express all his love for good design in the glass-cockpit area…
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Add a bluetooth ADS-B receiver and WAAS GPS and you get traffic, weather, and precision approaches. Shouldn’t be too hard, speaking as an iPhone developer.
Vincent,
I totally agree with you. I’ve often thought that if avionics manufacturers would hire just one human factors expert! And to be fair they may already have some of those people. But they really should hire one away from Apple.
I would guess to say that Garmin has probably some really cool ideas that they have run past the FAA but that the FAA has said, “No way”. It is one thing for your iTouch to be cool and easy to use but your life isn’t dependent on it working (well for some of us anyway). If I were to change the quote above I would say “Regulation makes simplicity complicated”.
Hi Vincent,
I’m not (yet!) a Pilot (I hope I’ll be next year
), however I’m a passionate of technology (including Apple stuff) and currently looking for avionics lately.
I do agree… I think there’s a LOT of things that could be done to make the cockpit more “idiot-proof”, more visually attractive.
Few thoughts:
- The Garmin GTN 750 is a great “touch” devices that prove we can have touchscreen and still keep the old button fashion way to enter data…
- The Corvalis TTx cockpit (using the Garmin G2000) is a great example of clean interface with two huge glass display to have a lot of vital information, with a flexible touchscreen input device (similar to the GTN Series BTW). It also show that a lot of features could be remotely accessible… removing “non-vital” buttons from the panel.
- The extreme example with the Icon A5, shows the “Sport Car” approach could work. If we look how much engineering has been in the car industry (in both engine, chassis, interior design, confort, safety, AI, etc…)… and even now present in cheap or affordable cars (airbags, ABS, ESP, etc…), we know the GA could step up the game by having some similar approaches. Who said should be complicated and couldn’t be accessible by mass people? Probably the same kind of guy that was thinking about the same with the first cars 200 years ago…
- Make it simple always gives the impression for the purist that it will remove the only thing that put him/her over the others… In a computer world, only computer-genius could use a computer 20 years ago… You had to know computer system to use it… Today, a 3 years old kid can use an iPad. Does it make him a Computer Genius? Nope… it just makes him a computer user. The same way every car drivers are not mechanics… So we might end, few years from now, by having Aircraft “Driver” that aren’t Pilot, neither space engineer… I do believe the computer-assisted VTOL could be a solution since in any time you could just press a “Hold your position” button… and in future, have all moments (taxi, take-off, crusing, landing) of a flight… done by the computer (Just enter your flight destination in the Nav/Com, that will be remotely updated by the ATC, or even automatically by auto-com with other aircraft (kind of ADS-B in-out). At this moment, you might just be a “aircraft user”… to use your an aircraft to go where you need to go.
My 2 cents,
Phil
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