NASA's ten man usability team 14 Feb 2007

CNET News has a nice article on the rising importance of human factors, featuring soundbytes from Jakob Nielsen, Alonso Vera (NASA), AnnaLee Saxenian (Dean of the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley) and John Maeda (MIT Media Lab). One statement worried us though:

"NASA, which has faced cutbacks in recent years, has a human-computer interaction group that's grown to 10 people since it was started in 2002."

Only ten people working on usability issues! Now I know that in days gone by, even a monkey could pilot a spacerocket, but surely they're a little more complex these days. I would have thought that hundreds of people would be involved in eliminating usability problems given what's at stake should an astronaut encounter one.