Alan Turing’s WWII code-breaking machines cracked few Enigma messages until colleague, John Herivel did some user research
John Herivel’s insights into the minds of German Enigma machine operators helped win World War II
The techniques of User experience design, often viewed as latecomers in the story of digital computing, were in fact present at its creation.
The usual narrative of the birth of the digital age is a story of technology triumphant. In reality, it was understanding the users at the other end of the Enigma traffic that provided a majority of code-breaking insights. During the dark days of 1940, when Hitler was overrunning France, and British troops had been pushed off the continent, Bletchley was having almost no success in breaking German transmissions. Then decryption analyst John Herivel achieved a breakthrough by a means that should be familiar to every UX designer: daydreaming.
“Every evening, I would sit down in front of the fire and put my feet up and think of some method of breaking into the [Luftwaffe Enigma Code Traffic]. I was very young and very confident, and I said I’m going to find some way to break into it. Then, one evening, I remember vividly suddenly finding myself thinking about the other end of the story, the German operators.”
Herivel used two things almost all of us he mapped out the User Flow, or envisioned a Persona. Does it matter that the user in this case was a guy in a Nazi uniform and that John Herivel was trying to win a war for the Allies rather than get him to complete his online purchase? No it does not. Our moral judgement of users and the context in which they use a product does not alter the fact that they are a human beings like us. and regardless of whether our job is to enable or inhibit their actions (in UX terms, Affordance and Constraint) , we first need to understand what motivates them, and based on those inferred motivations, hypothesize what actions they are likely to take.
In the case of John Herivel, that mental exercise produced an important insight:
“Then I had the thought,” Herivel said. “Suppose he was a lazy fellow and he were to leave the wheels untouched in the machine and bang the top down and look at the windows, see what letters were showing and just use them.”
This would be no surprise to any working user experience designer: people are lazy. Very few people who aren’t inveterate gearheads want to fuss with settings and preferences on complex machines, so they don’t if they don’t have to — and often if they do. In the words of UX researchers, they “satisfice: do just enough to accomplish a minimally defined task by whatever means come to hand.” For the Wehrmacht wireless operator, that meant leaving the Enigma wheel settings just where he found them.
And that’s UX in a nutshell. The designers of the Enigma machine knew that in order to maintain secrecy, operators must change the rotor settings every day. Nazi intelligence agencies demanded that they do so. But despite all those “shoulds,” some operators didn’t. By daydreaming his way into getting those operators’ heads, John Herivel was able to predict this.
And that helped us win the war.
