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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

#241

Post by alkonaut »

whatever_dude wrote: post #224
alkonaut wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be the case, but I sure wouldn’t have done it this way regardless. I would have pressed on to get the customer to revise the order, or just fixed it (criminal or not), or refused the job. This is clearly a case where all the downsides of bureaucracy were in full effect (someone might be afraid to touch something) but not the benefits (lots of security checks and balances such as in air traffic control).

> I would have pressed on to get the customer to revise the order, or just fixed it When "trying to do it right" means you have to go through layers and layers of bureaucracy and probably ruffle a few feathers in the process, over and over again, I can see how some people quick learn to "just do their job". This is human behavior. We can talk as much as we want about what would be the ideal solution here, and how we…

Yes - this is a very broken system and that needs to be addressed.

But what I was trying to say was that by either refusing to do it outright, o doing it right (without “asking for permission”). That is - I’d rather be jailed or fired than doing this. And I hope that goes for most devs.

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

#242

Post by usrusr »

jdmichal wrote: post #142
zimpenfish wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a forward thinking developer saying "hey should we at least have colored buttons Accessibility becomes an issue for colourblind people then.

Government standards never allow only color distinction. There always must be an additional factor than just color. For instance, here's some icons from NATO, which used to be MIL-STD-2525. You'll notice that all the icons differentiate in both color and form. The NTDS standards for Naval systems are similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_Joint_Military_Symbology#...

Well, in addition to the color coding I suppose the text would still be different?

To me, the screenshot looks more like a list of user-defined presets than something that went through the original software development process. Maybe something along the lines of only superuser can define new presets, but lower users can activate them. That way, at least random "I love you honeybunny" pranks would be avoided, but the risk of skipping a real warning because of insufficient permissions would be avoided.

A physical UI would have an openly accessible switch for "drill" and "not a drill" protected behind a seal that needs to be broken, this is difficult to replicate in software.

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

#243

Post by koolba »

7952 wrote: post #236
daveid wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want a button pushing clerk to be able to write any message to millions of people over an emergency network? There is so much potential for disaster in that idea. Options is much better. Having the employee type out the predefined message word for word would really be a good confirmation though.

> Do you want a button pushing clerk to be able to write any message to millions of people over an emergency network? Yes, in situations where the message does not fit within a pre-defined list due to an unexpected event. Of course it should still have security mechanism's to ensure that the transmission is properly authorised. The biggest threat is probably misuse by politicians rather than the poor clerk!

You're conflating two different issues. My original suggestion was a mechanism to prevent the clerk from accidentally sending the wrong message. Typing out the entirety of the message hopefully would force them to realize what they're sending.

Allowing a separate option for a clerk, maybe with confirmation from a supervisor or other clerk, to send an arbitrary message (with a separate approval chain) would be useful as well. In the Hawaii situation not having that option likely delayed sending out the retraction as they didn't have a built in.

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

#244

Post by fallingfrog »

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

I can almost guarantee it's a COBOL mainframe with a much more sensible UI which they put a screen scraper over to make it more "modern looking".

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

#245

Post by cmiles74 »

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 my opinion, this begs the question: what was the population of Hawaii expected to do in response to this warning? From my reading of the articles, for the most part people did not know what to do. In their position, without a clear plan, I might just hug my partner and children that one last time.

I wonder if there is a clear plan, and if there's a better way to communicate that to the population. That seems like maybe it should be more of a priority then this alert message, which seemed to only sow confusion.

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

#246

Post by notatoad »

bogomipz wrote: post #195

What is the provenance of this image? How do we know this is real? While UI/UX designers are falling all over themselves with their meme fest I didn't see any reference for the source of this image. If you read the Washington Post account, it says the interface was a drop down menu of which this picture is not of. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/1... And perhaps not surprisingly some n…

"This is real. provided by the office of the governor in hawaii"

https://twitter.com/CivilBeat/status/953270472820457472

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

#247

Post by cmiles74 »

giarc wrote: post #94
syphilis2 wrote: post #87

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".

It's all about context. It might be fine if that's a list of your website bookmarks and if you click the wrong one you just click a different one. But when the consequences of clicking the wrong one are such high magnitude, it's bad design. And I don't even think it's up for debate. If the design of the page just made someone accidentally alert a whole state of an incoming missile, then it's bad.

And remember that when you need to click it, you will be 100% entirely terrified by the incoming missile. Parsing through the list will itself be challenging under those circumstances.

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

#248

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

ryandrake wrote: post #240
robotsonic wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy the 'it costs too much' excuse. How much does it cost to go: Testing ... FOR REAL ... It's not perfect, but at least the test alerts and the real alerts are not mixed together.

But we're not talking about a web startup. I think if you saw the actual hourly work breakdown, cost breakdown, and number of people who would need to be involved to make that change your head would spin.

Recent project I worked on the dev cost ended up being about 10% of the total cost of the project. It's amazing how much effort it takes to move the institution any.

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

#249

Post by epicide »

JdeBP wrote: post #161
jandrese wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes. Luca Milan's, mentioned here at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16158252 . Compare M. Milan's design to the mainframe menu screens I have listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16158878 .

There is nothing about ncurses that prevents you from implementing the same crappy interface they have.

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

#250

Post by foobaw »

This is crazy. I used to work on the engineering-side of this on phones (CMAS). The amount of requirements from the government and the carriers for the UI/UX were ridiculous (how the messages are precisely displayed to the users, requirements regarding data scenarios). To give an example, it took about 300 hours to verify each release.

How is it possible that they don't have standards while the OEMs do?

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