Keep it clear

With a hat tip to Sippican Cottage, a story about how bad display design crashed a destroyer. Control of the engines and rudders can reside in several different machines on the bridge. Critical little bits of information are found in teeny tiny boxes -- the user interface is hair-raisingly bad. As for example, whether the propellers run at the same speed (you can turn if they don't; helpful if the rudder isn't turning you fast enough). As for example, whether your station has command and if so, of what (turns out that transfer of control goes one propeller at a time!). I'd want a big bright star, or sharply different color, to show what I've got control of, and something a bit more dramatic--like a big band connecting the thrust indicators--to tell whether the thrusters are in sync or not.

The ProPresenter our church uses for slides and videos puts a yellow rim around the image of whatever the current slide being projected is. I don't care for this; it should be as subtle as a brass band. (Maybe it's configurable--I need to complain.)

In the heat of the moment, you want your context switching to be as clear as possible. I know, I know--practice practice practice. The Navy has young sailors with a limited amount of practice time, the church has every-other-week volunteers, and whoever painted the traffic lines on the street forgot that you can't see over the hill and out-of-towners won't guess that there's a left turn on the other side.