by vitoc on 9/23/18, 9:03 AM with 60 comments
by philwelch on 9/24/18, 12:15 PM
I’m also kind of amused at how the entire business world basically said, “man, this company made super reliable cars in the 80’s and 90’s[1], let’s learn their secrets” and it turns out that once you strip away the exotic Japanese veneer, it’s mostly just systemized common sense. Which is not a minor thing to do, to be fair, except it’s easy for businesses to take good, well-systemized ideas and utterly misapply them.
[1] As far as I know, they still make reliable cars. But you can still drive a 92 Camry today if you wanted to with little fuss. By definition, we’re 26 years away from seeing if today’s Camry is quite that reliable.
by jihadjihad on 9/24/18, 12:13 PM
by mglhn on 9/24/18, 2:52 PM
One of my professors (I am an Industrial engineer) used the example of a SIM card. I imagine people can still get it wrong when putting it in, but much less so (ehem USB) because of that slight cut in the rectangle. It also helps a lot when manufacturing those things to get the orientation right.
Another mistake proofing anecdote I've heard was about one of his students interning at a company that packages soap. Somehow there were empty boxes going through the conveyors after some process change. Some of the mechanical engineers were already thinking about some modification to the conveyors that detect weight, etc. The IE student apparently simply went in one of the back offices and got a spare electric fan and pointed it at the conveyor so the empty boxes fly out. Troubleshooting doesn't have to be expensive.
by camtarn on 9/24/18, 1:01 PM
by synodinos on 9/24/18, 1:24 PM
Visual rhyme, Accessibility, Affordances, Mistake-proofing (“Poka-yoke”), and Defensive design.
https://medium.com/@dio/5-things-to-consider-when-evaluating...
by 2dollars27cents on 9/24/18, 5:24 PM
In my experience these things are developed over time in response to failure. Always keeping the poka-yoke concept in the back of your mind helps when designing systems, but you don't really know how people will misuse tools until they're in action.
by gorb314 on 9/24/18, 4:58 PM
In software, we know that the later a bug is caught, the more expensive (in terms of time / resources) it is to fix. So we want to catch bugs / mistakes earlier.
The "simple" idea that Poka-yoke introduces is to make it harder to make the mistake in the first place. If a physical component can be mounted more than one way, but there is only one correct way, then design it such that it is impossible to mount it incorrectly. This can be done by making the mounting holes for the part asymmetrical, for example.
IMO, in software a similar concept would be to fail early and fail hard.
by sharno on 9/24/18, 12:48 PM
I think that's a clear implementation of poka-yoke on the programming languages level allowing developers to fool proof their APIs
by MrEfficiency on 9/24/18, 12:41 PM
Now I put my handle in the correct location and its warm everyday.
by ninjakeyboard on 9/24/18, 5:40 PM
by tsuresh on 9/24/18, 6:35 PM
by baxtr on 9/24/18, 12:55 PM
by User23 on 9/24/18, 7:13 PM
For example I accident-proof myself against spills by keeping a beverage in a place where it's unlikely to be knocked over, but if it is that the consequences are easy to deal with rather than soaking a keyboard or something. In physical terms it mostly boils down to minimizing the potential energy of everyday objects.
by fouc on 9/24/18, 12:11 PM
by csense on 9/24/18, 8:11 PM
by manceraio on 9/25/18, 2:31 PM
by avodonosov on 9/24/18, 8:35 PM