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The U.S. Navy’s $100 million checkbox

Adrian Hanft
UX Collective
Published in
22 min readSep 28, 2019

Two years ago a Navy destroyer was ripped open by the nose of a Liberian tanker. Ten sailors were crushed or drowned as their sleeping quarters filled with water after the collision.

At the heart of the tragedy is a single checkbox on a touchscreen. This is the untold story of how bad design caused a crew to lose control of the $1.8 billion John S McCain destroyer and the mystery around how designers manage to avoid blame when their creations cause death and destruction.

Before going any further, I want to make it clear that I am just a civilian piecing together this story from whatever information I can glean from the internet. I have trudged through hundreds of pages of technical documents and dense reports. Much of this documentation is intentionally vague, some of it has been redacted, and all of it has undoubtedly been scrubbed by lawyers and PR professionals. As a result, there are probably errors in my analysis and conjecture. However, with that disclaimer in mind, I believe the following story may be the clearest, most human-readable account of the McCain accident that you will find anywhere. It may also be the first and only public source of real design criticism ever written in the two years since the accident. I am not sure…

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Written by Adrian Hanft

Author of User Zero: Inside the Tool that is Reshaping Dystopia

Responses (5)

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Wow!! What a very well written, thorough, thoughtful, clearly spoken article. So insightful and very, very interesting. The visuals you included as well as examining each piece of the problem helped illustrate your analysis of the situation. You can…

7

This is an EXCELLENT article. I've been in the defense industry my whole career. I build game-based military simulation software, and I get a front-row seat to how design" isn't even part of the conversation when it comes to military contracting. At…

Most of the flaws of the touchscreens could be just one software update away.

Great article, really interesting story. But for the above quote – peculiarities of work for governments are that sometimes (usually?) this is a one-time process, no iterative steps, no improvements, and maintenance limited to minimum. Additionally…