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It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii

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21–30 of 132 posts

Re: It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii

#21
post #16

Taking the opposite side side of the argument, good UX only matters for inexperienced employees. People that mindlessly click are going to mindlessly click "yes" on the confirmation dialog

So use a confirmation dialog that can't be mindlessly clicked through: https://i.imgur.com/P18lgRb.png

Re: It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii

#22
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't even need that. It should start by grouping the options by severity - separate the real alerts from the test alerts via section headers and you solve 99% of the problem.

My concern with severity groups is you have users and managers deciding which messages go in which severity groups. That ignores the impact of politics and short termism on the decision making process. (e.g. How severe is a missing child?). Before you know it, everything will be in severe, and your users will be asking for a "really, really severe" category.

Makes sense, but I would hope even the most inept manager could recognize that "AMBER Alert" and "Nuclear Annihilation Imminent" are different degrees of severity.

Re: It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii

#24

I've been "arguing" with people here as to what a better interface would look like, and it's interesting at how much disagreement there is. A lot (like too many) seem to think adding a yes/no dialog box would make things better, but it's well known users don't read dialog boxes. My preference would be a mcDonald's menu style UI, showing the text that will be sent in a 6x5 grid of buttons. Easy to press; easy to see w…

The problem in this particular case is that almost anything would be better. Probably the only thing to make this worse would be to also mislabel things.

Which is why there are plenty ideas for a better design.

Re: It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii

#25
post #16

Taking the opposite side side of the argument, good UX only matters for inexperienced employees. People that mindlessly click are going to mindlessly click "yes" on the confirmation dialog

Do we know if the test button also includes a confirmation dialog? In that case, the two actions are pretty much indistinguishable.

Good UX would eliminate any mindless clicking, for example: * significantly different workflow than the test workflow * requiring multi-person confirmation * showing the resulting action with (time-limited) undo * and more...

Re: It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii

#26
post #14

I've been "arguing" with people here as to what a better interface would look like, and it's interesting at how much disagreement there is. A lot (like too many) seem to think adding a yes/no dialog box would make things better, but it's well known users don't read dialog boxes. My preference would be a mcDonald's menu style UI, showing the text that will be sent in a 6x5 grid of buttons. Easy to press; easy to see w…

I would argue for a menu like this: https://twitter.com/iamlucamilan/status/953201356545974272 Combined with a confirmation dialog like this: https://twitter.com/Ajedi32/status/953303114995597312

Very much agree with the redesign of the page. Simple, much better.

The confirmation box however might be dangerous:

If employee panics they might easily fail to get that right resulting in a failure to warn in time.

Re: It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii

#27

> Ige, in his speech, deplored the fact that employees of the emergency management agency were getting death threats since the events of Saturday. Sounds like they need to prosecute some people for terroristic threats to the fullest extent of the law. I understand being pissed off about the false alarm, but sending death threats should be an automatic jail sentence at minimum.

Somehow we've landed in a world where death threats, swatting, etc don't generally have any real consequences, and that makes me very sad.

Re: It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii

#28

> Ige, in his speech, deplored the fact that employees of the emergency management agency were getting death threats since the events of Saturday. Sounds like they need to prosecute some people for terroristic threats to the fullest extent of the law. I understand being pissed off about the false alarm, but sending death threats should be an automatic jail sentence at minimum.

Why do you see that as terrorism?

Because that's literally the law:

> TERRORISTIC THREAT > > (a) A person commits an offense if he threatens to commit any offense involving violence to any person or property with intent to: > > 2. place any person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury;

Re: It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii

#29
At each level, people with grave responsibilities did not take their responsibility seriously enough. From the top to the bottom.

Button-pusher: obviously.

Interface designer: clearly.

Manager responsible for project: also

The manager's manager: yes

The whole department head: how is this person making decisions?

The people who set the budgets and procedures: How do they know that work is being done well enough?

Vern Miyagi: From decades in the army, your process designers should understand best practices in the design of emergency systems, and yet they clearly did not. Why?

Arthur "Joe" Logan: Same question.

Ironically http://dod.hawaii.gov/hiema/hawaii-emergency-management-agen... fails with a Javascript error about "superclick is not a function".

Anyway it goes all the way up, apparently through the military chain of command. So I say Thanks Obama.

Re: It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii

#30
post #11

The UX in most software made for the government is terrible. At the end of the day, I think anyone clicking any button in that list should have been well aware of what those buttons do especially since clicking that button was a routine part of the shift change process in that shop. Bad UX, sure. But that person dun goofed.

Often times a web page will have buttons that dance around the screen, if the page is still loading elements. That can cause misclicks too.
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