Originally Posted by
Centaurus
It should not be forgotten that the original concept behind flight director use was that it was an aid to instrument flying and nothing else.
Unfortunately over the years, that concept has morphed [...]
I am not sure it is the concept that has changed, but rather the users and their understanding of the concept. A workload reduction tool does something for you, but it is actually just a small change of interpretation/perspective between that and a tool that tells you what to do.
<begin rant (sort of)>
I think this is an inherent problem in human interface design - you are designing for an extremely adaptable animal, not just a moving target but an unpredictable one. It is also a generational issue, each generation trains the next - what is designed, successfully, as a workload reduction for the first generation (who lived without it) becomes a crutch for the next (who know how to live without it, but haven't had to) and for subsequent generations it becomes their master, because they have never even known of a life without it.
In aviation the generations are actually quite long - aircraft last for decades, aircraft _designs_ last for decades longer, but in other fields you can see this effect go through every stage in a handful of years. Particularly true in software where product UI can change radically between releases, in maybe less than a year, and where customers have users training users with the whole staff turning over every couple of years. In fact I didn't do UI when I did flying software, and it was only after seeing this sort of thing happen in other fields that I looked back at Children of the Magenta Line and really understood how widely it applies.
If there was some way to strip the aviation-specific language out of Children of the Magenta Line and generalise while keeping the impact of the talk, I would make that video mandatory viewing for any user or customer who asks for UI changes to make stuff "easier" or "reduce workload" (by which they almost always mean "so we can use fewer, cheaper, less trained people").
<End of rant, back to lurking>