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Sorry to break a myth, but you'll never hear someone about “THE RED BUTTON ” in a nuclear control room. There's way too much buttons that happens to be red for that.

Nuclear operators are highly trained professionals (two years of training in France, for instance) who know their machine by heart, so what you'll hear will be much more specific like “isolate vapor generator number 3”. Also, the way it's organized it will very rarely be orders, but instead description if what each of them are doing while following the safety procedure, to keep other crew members aware of what they're doing.

So no “Press that god damn red button!” but instead “I'm bypassing turbine through GCTA and moving to step 342.B.3”.

by ChrisMarshallNY11 hours ago|

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META: Make sure that your adblocker is set to 11 on that site.

In the first edition of The Design of Everyday Things[0], Norman has a photo of beer tap handles on control levers in a nuclear power plant control room. This was done, to differentiate two important handles.

I won’t link to the photo, because it’s on personal blogs, and I don’t want to hug anyone’s site to death.

The photo was removed, in the current version.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

by Rotundo8 hours ago|

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I've seen pictures of the cockpit of a large plane where the gear lever has an actual wheel on the end of it.

I think that is exceptional good design.

by wwind12312 hours ago|

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A few years ago I listened to a seminar where a few real professional doctors discussed the hospital scenes in movies or TV shows. They mentioned that those dramatic and chaotic operation room scenes where the doctor yells commands with a loud voice look so fake to them. In a real operation room, everyone (including the doctor and the nurses) is highly trained, works in tandem calmly and efficiently -- there's never a need to raise voice.

by viciousvoxel11 hours ago|

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There's a big difference between the (controlled) chaos of an ER vs scheduled surgery, but it's still dramatized for TV obviously.

by Lio12 hours ago|

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Vintage nuclear plants are also infamously used as the canonical examples of bad UI in teaching.

To paraphrase, the Three Mile Island Disaster happened because the operators couldn't discern the right red light in a sea of other lights and noise.

https://uxdesign.cc/three-mile-island-how-bad-ux-led-to-a-nu...

by stymaar12 hours ago|

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The lessons of TMI have been learned though, the accident has been thoroughly investigated and that's the reason why it's now being discussed in class.

by Lio12 hours ago|

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Of course but we're talking about vintage control room designs here, some of which predate that investigation, so it still seems relevant to point out.

by stymaar11 hours ago|

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AFAIK All of them have been retrofitted to take the lessons from TMI into account (I can't be sure about other countries, but in France it's definitely the case).

And more importantly, the process around how you're supposed to take information from the controls during a crisis has been completely rethought, negating the issues found during TMI investigations.