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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

#81

Post by mannykannot »

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…

You are more concerned about what you see as inappropriate criticism of one aspect of this UI design than you are by anything else in this debacle? I hope you will be able to broaden your horizon, if only because narrow perspectives were probably part of the problem, as they often are.

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

#82

Post by jandrese »

JdeBP wrote: post #67
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.

That's useless then. That's the sort of dialog that trains users to ignore it because it offers no useful information.

There's a post just a short distance down that twitter thread to a simple layout change that would have made it difficult to choose the wrong option by simply categorizing the options properly. But I'm betting that list is autogenerated on a hardcoded template from some goddamn database somewhere in this enterprise app that makes a simple layout change like that a nightmare to implement.

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

#83

Post by jschwartzi »

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…

This routinely happens where I work. To the extent that our UI is this random mishmash of paradigms depending on who was in the room when the decision was made. If I had a nickel for every time I said "if the mechanical hardware does (blank) we should let the user know so they know not to start the rest of the process" only to get blank stares or laughter from the senior engineers, I would retire. "We'll take care of it with training" is a common refrain, as if training can be remembered with perfect clarity at all times.

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

#84

Post by goatlover »

megaman22 wrote: post #10

Holy hell... I was expecting some old ncurses mainframe design with shitty interface, but if it's just an href... seems like it'd be trivial to hack and cause havoc

Just slap a web interface over everything. I was expecting something old, too. But this is worse, since it's so easy to click the wrong link.

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

#85

Post by maxerickson »

joshstrange wrote: post #70
maxerickson wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, but they are complaining about the whole system failing.

So even if the spec is where the "false alarm" button was omitted, it's still a reasonable complaint that the system was designed without it.

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

#86

Post by jandrese »

joshstrange wrote: post #48
ceejayoz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

According to the Twitter thread the option at the bottom of the list (False Alarm) was added as the fix to this problem. Making a reasonable UI was apparently not an option.

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

#87

Post by syphilis2 »

I think I'm the only person who saw it and thought it was fine. It's a list of clearly labeled text links, very clear very simple. There are some changes that could be made to separate drills/tests from real events (or a different naming convention), but I'm surprised to see many people call a single page text list "terrible UI".

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

#89

Post by jandrese »

code_duck wrote: post #40

The WaPo reports it was from an interface with a drop-down menu. “Around 8:05 a.m., the Hawaii emergency employee initiated the internal test, according to a timeline released by the state. From a drop-down menu on a computer program, he saw two options: “Test missile alert” and “Missile alert.” He was supposed to choose the former; as much of the world now knows, he chose the latter, an initiation of a real-life mis…

Rule of thumb with tech reporting is that the reporters always get the details wrong. Nothing shatters the illusion like watching a story where you know the actual facts of the case and seeing just how much they get wrong.

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

#90

Post by jim_dow_jones »

uptown wrote: post #37

"Days after Hawaii alert gaffe, Japan issues false alarm about a missile launch" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-japan...

Wow, that's a pretty big coincidence. What would be the purpose of both states intentionally setting off false alarms?
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