Is there a man machine interface that you have encountered that you think needs improvement?

Answer 1

Most MMIs could use some improvement.

In the worst cases where controls produce unexpected or counterintuitive results (e.g. selecting an action on a multimodal control that normally increases/decreases a setting that in one mode of the control cancels or reverses the expected action, an ambiguous indication of what mode a multimodal control is in resulting in entering data to a system other than the one the user is expecting) these must be corrected for safety reasons!

Others are just nuisance level that the user gets used to, but should not have to.

One problem is on many modern systems the MMI is designed by computer programmers that do not understand the environment that the system will be used in and without any Human Factors Analysis having been done to understand how users will interact with the interface.

On MMIs using touch controls (e.g. touchscreens, trackpads) some people have handicaps (e.g. tremor) that confuses the MMI. These systems should have a means of disabling the touch control and using external devices (e.g. mice, keyboards) that are more tolerant of the user's handicaps.