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In the very beginning, when I first started  becoming a designer, which was the 1980s,
I was concerned about the early adoption of computer systems
which were really almost impossible for anybody to understand.
Even the experts who designed them were making errors in using them.
And there's a famous case where the early Unix  systems had a text editor

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that was called 'Ed', for 'editor'.
You could type away and type your program  or your text, whatever you were doing,
and spend several hours typing it. And you'd have this wonderful document.
And then you (say), 'Ah, I'm finished!' and you turn off the machine and go home.
And you come back the next morning to continue, and...
it wasn't there. Well, why wasn't it there?
Because you *didn't save* it.
And, well, you mean... The system doesn't bother to tell you when you try to turn it off that
'Hey – you want to save the information?'

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It was little things like that that were so frustrating.
In the early days, what we did was we tried to study the people who used these complex systems.
And it was not just computer systems; I actually started off studying
*nuclear power systems*, some of the nuclear power accidents where the control rooms were
so badly designed that if you wanted to cause an error, you could not have done a better job in
designing something to cause errors.
And then *aviation safety*,  where lives were at stake;
many lives were at stake, and there were a huge amount of research and work done.

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And that was a really good place to work.
I worked with the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Most people think of NASA as shooting rockets up into space,
but they forget the first two letters, 'NA', are 'Aeronautics';
and so, NASA is the world's leader often  in aviation safety.
And that's where I started.
So, we were looking, though, at the *users* of these systems, and so we called them 'users'.