WEBVTT 00:00:07.360 --> 00:00:12.852 In the very beginning, when I first started  becoming a designer, which was the 1980s, 00:00:12.852 --> 00:00:17.839 I was concerned about the early adoption of computer systems 00:00:17.839 --> 00:00:21.100 which were really almost impossible for anybody to understand. 00:00:21.100 --> 00:00:25.312 Even the experts who designed them were making errors in using them. 00:00:25.440 --> 00:00:31.013 And there's a famous case where the early Unix  systems had a text editor 00:00:31.013 --> 00:00:33.750 that was called 'Ed', for 'editor'. 00:00:33.750 --> 00:00:38.171 You could type away and type your program  or your text, whatever you were doing, 00:00:38.171 --> 00:00:42.072 and spend several hours typing it. And you'd have this wonderful document. 00:00:42.149 --> 00:00:45.855 And then you (say), 'Ah, I'm finished!' and you turn off the machine and go home. 00:00:45.855 --> 00:00:48.542 And you come back the next morning to continue, and... 00:00:48.542 --> 00:00:51.501 it wasn't there. Well, why wasn't it there? 00:00:51.501 --> 00:00:53.861 Because you *didn't save* it. 00:00:53.861 --> 00:00:58.432 And, well, you mean... The system doesn't bother to tell you when you try to turn it off that 00:00:58.432 --> 00:01:00.948 'Hey – you want to save the information?' 00:01:00.948 --> 00:01:04.494 It was little things like that that were so frustrating. 00:01:04.494 --> 00:01:10.240 In the early days, what we did was we tried to study the people who used these complex systems. 00:01:10.240 --> 00:01:14.103 And it was not just computer systems; I actually started off studying 00:01:14.160 --> 00:01:18.606 *nuclear power systems*, some of the nuclear power accidents where the control rooms were 00:01:18.606 --> 00:01:23.762 so badly designed that if you wanted to cause an error, you could not have done a better job in 00:01:23.762 --> 00:01:26.251 designing something to cause errors. 00:01:26.251 --> 00:01:29.916 And then *aviation safety*,  where lives were at stake; 00:01:29.916 --> 00:01:34.855 many lives were at stake, and there were a huge amount of research and work done. 00:01:34.855 --> 00:01:37.207 And that was a really good place to work. 00:01:37.207 --> 00:01:42.578 I worked with the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). 00:01:42.578 --> 00:01:46.047 Most people think of NASA as shooting rockets up into space, 00:01:46.047 --> 00:01:50.566 but they forget the first two letters, 'NA', are 'Aeronautics'; 00:01:50.566 --> 00:01:55.185 and so, NASA is the world's leader often  in aviation safety. 00:01:55.185 --> 00:01:57.408 And that's where I started. 00:01:57.408 --> 00:02:02.831 So, we were looking, though, at the *users* of these systems, and so we called them 'users'.