alt Hacker News> It's not colourful but everything is well made because it's made for professionals.
Nuclear plants, planes, etc use colour so you can differentiate very quickly under pressure. Much easier to shout "THE RED BUTTON!!!" than "The second button five down from the left!"
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Lio • today at 7:48 AM
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...
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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”.