I have designed many user interfaces in industry. I have seen people get confused and make mistakes on a badly designed interface. I agree with the majority of posters here, in particular FDG135.
As mentioned earlier the cognitive mind has a limited capacity. In a high demand situation when we get more and more things we have to process we can get to a point where we can no longer process any more information. This is commonly called task saturation. The number of tasks we perform at once is relevent, but the issue we are disscussing now in this thread is the amount of mental processing a particular task consumes.
Some tasks consume more cognitive “energy” than others (cognitive “energy” is the best description for me). Reading a technical manual will generally consume more than glossy magazine. An intense political debate will consume more than a casual conversation. A well designed interface consumes less cognitive “energy”, leaving more for any demanding situation that may arise. A clear and quickly recognisable display is important.
When flying or driving our cognitive mind takes inputs from the various senses such as sight, sound and feel. The less cognitive “energy” consumed by these inputs the more there is left over for analysing these inputs and implementing the correct or most survival response based on our training and experience.
In normal situations the digital display is fine, but they do require more mental processing than a typical analogue display, which results in less mental processing capacity for other tasks such as flying the plane. In a high demand situation it can mean the difference between life and death. AF447 and Asiana214 pilots did have a higher demand on them at the time than what they were used to. Whether or not a different interface would have affected the outcome is of course debatable.
The physical and mental condition of a person at a particular time also affects his cognitive capacity. This includes stress, sleep, diet, training level, experience etc
Last edited by Cool Guys; 2nd Aug 2014 at 18:26.
Reason: Corrected some formatting