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The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

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Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#22

Post by 0xTJ »

andrepd wrote: post #9

Yikes. Now consider this: this is the design for the missile warning system. It is possible, even likely, that some missile launch system has similar catastrophic UI. How we've not wiped ourselves off by accident so far is a miracle.

I'd disagree on the first point, but only because it seems that many launch systems use floppy drives. (The big ones)

Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#24

Post by t3f »

crististm wrote: post #14

In the defence of those that made the UX, this is version 1. Or prototype. Or something they paid a ten year old with candies to make... Or they don't get it and they are hopeless. No, they do get it. The DRILL link is one row away from non-DRILL link to avoid incorrect dispatching. In the mean time you can ponder if you need to announce a tsunami.

>In the mean time you can ponder if you need to announce a tsunami.

I would suggest that recent history [1] has shown we can have a 30m-2h warning, and that isn't good enough.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_a...

Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#25

Post by joshstrange »

The thing that annoys me most about this situation is people complaining about how long it took to send out the "Sorry, there was no missile" message. Just as I expected these were hard-coded messages that were sent out by a button (link) click and not a free-form text area. There are many (good) reasons you want your program set up this way (let's ignore the rest of the terrible UI/UX for now).

It makes complete sense to me that given a spec of "make a button send this specific text" you would end up with this. So it's very easy to send the initial message but sending a custom follow up requires contacting someone with access to the underlying system who can send a custom message.

In the same way that I may give internal users the ability to fire off SPECIFIC (maybe with placeholders) push notifications with the press of a button but not custom messages. Sure my underlying infrastructure can handle custom messages but the UI for such a feature does not exist (or at least is not available to the person who might have the ability to send preset messages).

All in all this was terrible for the people in Hawaii, no doubt. That said I WANT my missile alert system to be easy to activate to give people the most time I can to prepare. The best fix for this (yes a new UI/UX would be best but let's be realistic on how much time/energy they are willing to spend on this) would be a scary looking alert confirmation dialog of "Are you sure you want to send this alert to the whole state?" and maybe have to type a confirmation string.

Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#26

Post by ceejayoz »

joshstrange wrote: post #25

The thing that annoys me most about this situation is people complaining about how long it took to send out the "Sorry, there was no missile" message. Just as I expected these were hard-coded messages that were sent out by a button (link) click and not a free-form text area. There are many (good) reasons you want your program set up this way (let's ignore the rest of the terrible UI/UX for now). It makes complete sen…

It'd be nice to have a nice big divider between "live" and "test" messages, and different colors for the two. Small tweaks would go a long way here.

Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

#30

Post by DanBC »

Human Factors is becoming more well known, especially in health care.

This screen is scary. Now imagine drugs used during surgery that look almost identical.

Here are some exampels:

https://twitter.com/EzDrugID/status/933871776152543233

https://twitter.com/EzDrugID/status/850259195618131968

It's frustrating that we know this is a source of human error and that we're still doing it.

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