As you can see there are a lot of big screens and very few actual buttons and switches in that photo. It looks like the four keyboards are the bulk of the buttons. I would be curious to know how modal those screens are and how much information they can display at one point in time. It doesn’t look like they can display much and I can’t imagine that it’s fun to go hunting for necessary information in an emergency. Depending on how that works it might be a usability nightmare, one can only hope that Airbus does plenty of UI testing.
(In that context an interesting question is what this interface is optimized for. It may work great on normal flights – that’s nearly all of them, by the way – but break down horribly in emergencies. I guess the UI design rule of designing for the common and not the rare case doesn’t really apply here.)
Actually I was reading an article (I can't find it now) about that Qantas A380 engine explosion, and it said that this was a genuine problem in that situation. Once the engine blew up, there were dozens and dozens of different errors popping up, and the first thing the pilots had to do was to page through all the error codes and prioritize them to figure out what the real problems were.
In many ways, better to have a single giant control panel which lights up a different light for each error that can occur.
This is actually an artifact of the way planes are certified today (DO-178B). The verification process has to be done by hand - you can't verify automatically generated computer code.
The result is that you can't build say, a prolog program which produces a huge switch statement to prioritize errors. As a result, there effectively is no prioritization of errors and warnings at all. They're all treated as the same severity.
The new standard, DO-178C allows for computer models to be used in verification. So we may start seeing automated prioritization and management in the generation of planes after the A380/787.
Nuke plants have a great many buttons, dials, gauges and levers, too, according to one of Don Norman's books.
ADDED. Norman said that one of the advantages is that when one operator lowers the aperture on value 68 (or whatever) the other operators can easily tell that that is what he is doing.
