Analog gauges and the user interface

I attended the course in Boston yesterday, and enjoyed it very much. Made me think about the following story which might spur some discussion or comments here. It seems related to the overall theme here.

In 1985 I attended an OOPSLA (Object oriented programming languages …) conference. Alan Kay (PARC/Smalltalk/ Apple/Macintosh/…) gave a presentation. Alan told the following true story:

He once flew down to Mexico on vacation, to some lonely place on the California peninsula for surfing etc. A pilot was supposed to come in a week to pick him up at a rural landing strip. Alan got there on time, waited, and eventually the plane, an older DC3, came. When Alan entered the plane he noticed that allmost all the instruments had been unscrewed from the panels, pulled out and twisted around in various positions, and were basically standing (or waving) on their cable hoses like flowers on their stems. He got worried, considered exiting the plane, but decided to stay. The pilot, a younger fellow, seemed trustworthy.

When the plane had reached cruising altitude and speed Alan suddenly “got it” wrt. the instruments. As long as everything was operating correctly, all the needles on the instruments was pointing in the same direction! It was very easy to spot if anything out
of the ordinary was going on, and what that might be.

This story has stuck with me as a super example of adapting the
technology to what we people are good at, as opposed to the other
way around which is too often the case.

Enjoy,

Harald