Boink, Boink, Boink, Boink ….

“Please be Patient As the monitors take a few moments to respond” said the stewardess with the French Canadian accent.

The instruction was buried in the usual bi-lingual set of pre-flight instructions as I sat on the tarmac in Toronto. I, like most passengers, was only semi-listening to the tiresome drill on airplane safety and etiquette. I would guess that few (if any) people really pay attention to the prattle, each of us anxious to get going. It was the new seat-back entertainment system she was talking about. The touch sensitive flat-screen, thin-client monitors that are to keep you mesmerized and passive for hours.

Video Entertainment for Imobile Technotards

I feel I can completely zone out on these customer-service speeches because of the frequency of my travel and the familiarity I have with the routine of air travel on a certain Canadian airline. But I really wish the guy sitting behind me should have paid attention. Shortly after the seat-belt light went out, he began poking vigorously at what felt like the back of my head. Boink, boink, boink, boink….. My entertainment system, and everyone around me worked fine. What was the guy’s problem?

Boink, boink, boink…. Then it occurred to me, he was pressing and re-pressing the virtual buttons on the screen faster than the server could feed him the next page. Boink, boink, boink faster and faster and with more force as he became more frustrated.While I was getting increasingly annoyed at the guy, I can’t completely fault him. These touch-screen monitors have an annoying characteristic of being slower than what most people would feel is reasonable. You push a button and nothing happens. The next page doesn’t load (or the movie doesn’t play) and there is no audio or tactile feedback. You have to wait a half-second to see the cursor change to a little hour-glass, but the guy behind me was big (fat fingers, I guess) and clearly not computer savvy enough to wait for the system to catch up with his performance expectations. Boink, boink, boink, boink, …. Grrrrrrr!

Technotards

My fellow passenger’s impatience with his personal entertainment system must not have been unique as the air line took the decision to include the operating advice into every flight attendant’s pre-flight soliloquy. Now that is interesting. I started speculating on the series of events that must have happened to compel them to do this.

The airline, wanting to keep up with the times and fend off competitors puts out an RFP for an in-flight entertainment system. Vendors put forward their solutions, evaluation is done. A winner is chosen, money is negotiated, contracts are signed. Aircraft retrofitting schedules are built. Thousands of devices and servers are purchased and installed. Training, documentation, and maintenance programs are created for the numerous people that will have to keep these devices working for years. With much fanfare, the airline boasts of the expensive new feature in advertising campaigns. Then, the problem reports start creeping in. Management is getting more and more reports from their cabin crew of frustrated passengers and they want to know what to tell them. Consternation and finger pointing result. Vendors get blamed and they in turn deflect the blame to integrators, installers, the techno-tarded end-user, etc. Consultants are hired and render their opinion. It was either not possible to speed up the response of these particular devices or the cost is prohibitive.

Galling Inconvenience

My day-dream concludes with Management reluctantly having to accept the user-interface problem as unsolvable technically. They resort to having to deal with it by changing pre-flight processes to include the advice to passengers. Now, advice to be patient with the lethargic entertainment system must be repeated hundreds of times a day across Canada. Thousands of times a month. Tens of thousands of times a year. The inconvenience of this must be galling to the airlines Customer Service team.

The lesson? While this problem falls under the ‘nuisance’ category, it is indicative of problems that I have seen again and again. Technology without usability is crippled. There is no substitute for testing and evaluation of a system by the actual end-users to uncover faults. So, for the foreseeable future, passengers across Canadian airspace will be busy boinking and being boinked.