Quick little thread on designing systems for human use: any attempt to design a system for efficiency or speed has to take into account the people using it as a component of the system.



Let's talk boarding planes.

There's a theoretical fastest way to get passengers on a plane, created by an astrophysicist: Right hand window seat in the last row first, then the seat two rows up from that, and so on, every other right hand window seat all the way up...

...and then you switch sides, and you repeat it for the middle, and aisle seats, and then you start over and do the same thing with the rows you skipped. On paper, this is the fastest system because no one is ever in anybody else's way, not for the bins or to dig out a seat belt.