Murphy's Law: The Interface Sucks

Archives

March 29, 2007: Anyone who has played video or PC games knows how important interface (the way the game looks and operates) is. The U.S. Air Force recently rediscovered this when they tried to introduce a new software system for keeping track of military and civilian aircraft over North America. For a long time, the military had a radar system (NORAD) for tracking military aircraft, and the FAA (Federal Aviation Authority) had a separate one for tracking commercial aircraft. After September 11, 2001, it was decided to integrate the FAA data into the military (NORAD) system. This was done rather quickly (the programmers improvised) to produce the NORAD Contingency Suite, which everyone liked. It worked, and was easy to understand.

But a more expensive, and extensive, system, called Battle Control System-Fixed (BSC-F), which has more features and is custom made for combining military and civilian radar information, has recently been made available. The troops do not like it. The developers of BSC-F reply that their system uses new interface features in order to deliver more information. No, the users say, the BSC-F interface just sucks. Discussions are under way to deal with the situation. This may, or may, not resolve the argument over whether or not the BSC-F interface sucks.

 

X

ad

Help Keep Us From Drying Up

We need your help! Our subscription base has slowly been dwindling.

Each month we count on your contributions. You can support us in the following ways:

  1. Make sure you spread the word about us. Two ways to do that are to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
  2. Subscribe to our daily newsletter. We’ll send the news to your email box, and you don’t have to come to the site unless you want to read columns or see photos.
  3. You can contribute to the health of StrategyPage.
Subscribe   Contribute   Close