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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

#41

Post by astura »

ourmandave wrote: post #35
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…

...would be a scary looking alert confirmation dialog If I had a bitcoin for every time someone clicked through the confirm dialog without looking...

I don't recall the source, so I'm not sure of the accuracy, but I read that this is what happened, the employee clicked through the confirmation screen.

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

#42

Post by misnome »

jcranmer wrote: post #34
PKop wrote: post #5

Probably the worst UX design (considering the context and the stakes) I've ever seen. How could multiple people accept this as the interface? Put it on a separate page! Have an explicit confirmation dialog, or 3 of them. At the very least maybe it's own section with some padding... Ridiculous.

An ICBM will land about 30 minutes after it launches. At those kinds of timescales, every delay you put in somebody's path to issue the warning, even a few seconds, is going to be a cost measured in lives. How many people are you willing to kill to reduce the risk of a false alarm?

By that argument, this is worse because the person might have to hunt around in a pile of similar looking links for the one button, with an increased chance of getting it wrong and issuing the wrong alert.

Really, there is no way to justify this as in any way "intentionally designed".

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

#43

Post by agumonkey »

whatever_dude wrote: post #19

It's easy to see how this is bad, and I bet dozens of designers are now creating alternatives for their dribble and Twitter appreciation, but the problem is probably what led to this, not this specifically. I can see it: a contractor started with a link that triggers a push notification, then someone requested another link, then another, then it grew from there, never having the ability to stop and rethink this from…

what would you call regular re-evaluation of a system ? hygiene ?

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

#44

Post by Pulcinella »

ghaff wrote: post #33
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…

>maybe have to type a confirmation string Having to type out YES or some phrase is a fairly common "Are you really sure you want to do this??" sort of thing. I gather they're also looking at requiring a second person's confirmation which, if practical and very unlikely to make it impossible to send any message, seems reasonable as well.

I think I have read some research in healthcare field that such confirmations aren’t s helpful as you would think.

One reason of course is a combination of alarm fatigue and the fact that software has trained people to just always click yes when an annoying pop up appears.

Another is that people will think the have already clicked the correct thing button. So it’s less “Oh a confirmation box has appeared, let me confirm that I pressed the correct button” and more “stupid computer, of course I clicked the right button, that’s what I want to do!” without realizing they did in fact accidentally click the wrong button.

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

#45

Post by 24gttghh »

jcranmer wrote: post #34
PKop wrote: post #5

Probably the worst UX design (considering the context and the stakes) I've ever seen. How could multiple people accept this as the interface? Put it on a separate page! Have an explicit confirmation dialog, or 3 of them. At the very least maybe it's own section with some padding... Ridiculous.

An ICBM will land about 30 minutes after it launches. At those kinds of timescales, every delay you put in somebody's path to issue the warning, even a few seconds, is going to be a cost measured in lives. How many people are you willing to kill to reduce the risk of a false alarm?

They could at least make the non-test warnings a Red hyperlink or something, and organize them on a separate part of the page away from the test warnings... If that picture is legit, it's laughably bad. I have a feeling adding a confirmation dialog that takes an extra 200ms to click isn't gonna make much of a difference either when a thermonuclear warhead is heading your way...

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

#46

Post by itronitron »

escapecharacter wrote: post #31
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.

Relevant Far Side comic: https://i.imgur.com/AosYvGn.jpg

The designer of that control could have simplified things by just labeling the states as "ON" and "OFF"

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

#48

Post by joshstrange »

ceejayoz wrote: post #26
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.

100% Agree, there are a million little things that could have been done differently/better. My point really was trying to focus on that the delay in follow-up was completely understandable (also unfortunate) and that there was definitely some low hanging fruit for improvement (your suggestions being chief among them). This is, however, the UI/UX use end up with when you produce a specific spec and farm it out to the lowest bidder.

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

#50

Post by jonlucc »

ourmandave wrote: post #35
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…

...would be a scary looking alert confirmation dialog If I had a bitcoin for every time someone clicked through the confirm dialog without looking...

I'd suggest it only go on the dire warnings; don't have a confirmation on the drill alerts, but yeah, it's not a perfect fix.
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