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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

#61

Post by crispyambulance »

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…

It looks like quite a normal UI from an "internal" government or enterprise application point of view.

In this case, the citizens of Hawaii paid for the bad system design with 48 minutes of existential horror.

But these kinds of mistakes happens ALL THE TIME with "enterprise applications." Oracle has similar horrendous UX for their EBS (Enterprise Business Suite), so does SAP, Siemens, etc. People regularly make costly mistakes in shipping and receiving, purchasing and manufacturing because they have to deal with shitty confusing applications that look just like that screenshot.

Totally not surprising that the internal application for public emergencies has the same awfulness as PTO request.

I expect the same employee in Hawaii fumbled the UI on their "time off request" for psychiatric counseling too.

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

#62

Post by gus_massa »

astura wrote: post #41
ourmandave wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

Does the "drill" link also have a confirmation screen? Do the two confirmation screen look equal or they are different?

If they are equal (for example a generic message like "Are you sure?") then it's almost like no confirmation, because people get trained to click it automatically.

I think that ideally each one must have a "nice" image about the alarm, that is very different from the other images.

Another possibility is to force the user to retype the message, so the user must read and understand the actual message to be send. (Remember to disallow cut and paste.) (Allow a small number of typos, perhaps a Levenshtein distance of 4 or 5, because the user will be probably nervous if there are some incoming missiles.)

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

#63

Post by astura »

itronitron wrote: post #58
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…

I think a big problem is that people that don't have a lot of experience with design treat design decisions as subjective and arbitrary when in fact there is a lot of science to back up certain design choices (human vision, cognitive psychology, and not A/B testing.) As a result the approval process for any design, whether the initial or a redesign, gets stuck on the desks of various people that either don't feel qua…

Yeah, not only that but, in my experience at least, the design of the person who is most opinionated and jerkish is the one which gets implemented.

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

#64

Post by itronitron »

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?

In the current UI, the 'real alert' and the 'drill alert' have equal visual weighting, hence equal priority, and share about 75% of the same text.

I agree that the 'real alert' should not be impeded and they could at least put a red or black rectangle around the 'real alert' button to make it stand out from the others.

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

#65

Post by vonmoltke »

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?

> 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.

Actually, considering that timescale and all the variables involved in detection and tracking a few seconds is less than the margin of error for predicting the warhead's arrival. While the goal should obviously be to get a (valid) warning to the public as quickly as practical, the "every second counts" mantra in this situation is overly dramatic. In fact, I think it is even counterproductive because it can lead to a "better safe than sorry" attitude that triggers unnecessary false alarms.

> How many people are you willing to kill to reduce the risk of a false alarm?

Depends. How many people might die in a false alarm? How many people might die if they stop trusting the alert system and fail to properly react to a true alarm?

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

#66

Post by astura »

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.

Totally unscientific idea:

Have PINs required for certain critical operations and post those PINs in multiple places around the facility. Each PIN is different for each operation. That way the user has to look up the PIN before sending out the "you're going to die" message.

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

#67

Post by JdeBP »

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…

The claim at https://twitter.com/discreetsecure/status/953226818357727233 is that there already is a confirmation dialogue. It is the same for every option, and it does not mention which option has been chosen.

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

#68

Post by tonyarkles »

itronitron wrote: post #58
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…

I think a big problem is that people that don't have a lot of experience with design treat design decisions as subjective and arbitrary when in fact there is a lot of science to back up certain design choices (human vision, cognitive psychology, and not A/B testing.) As a result the approval process for any design, whether the initial or a redesign, gets stuck on the desks of various people that either don't feel qua…

Part of that, I think, is a presentation problem. And I'm admittedly coming from a small sample size of designers I've worked with.

When I've been given PSDs in the past, either for review or for implementation, there's never been any documentation with any of the reasoning behind any of it. And when I've asked follow-up questions about why something was done the way it was, I've typically been met with either defensiveness or "that's how it is, now go and build it"

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

#69

Post by fredley »

DanBC wrote: post #30

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.

I wouldn't call it a source of human error, but it's a huge amplifier for it. It adds massively to the cognitive overhead of performing and monitoring tasks.

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

#70

Post by joshstrange »

maxerickson wrote: post #56
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…

That's an interesting thing to be annoyed about given that a faster way to send out the false alarm notification is one of the mitigations they have put in place.

No, I'm annoyed that people seem to think people sat around doing jack shit for some 30+ minutes instead of sending out the false alarm message. I'm confident they were going as fast as they can and I don't like the blaming of the operator for what was a failing in the designed software. I'm not even sure I blame the people that wrote the software as I'm sure they were given a very specific spec of what it should do and they met the spec.
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