61–70 of 132 posts
Let me know if I'm being misinformed by low-life YouTube conspirators.
For all developers asked to design something or not given a design - CSS padding is your friend. Add spacing and then add more. It won't make it a masterpiece but it'll prevent misclicks and make the UI easier to read and understand. Also, use headings like "Amber Alerts", "Weather" and "War". And, use semantic titles like "[TEST] Tsunami" or "ALERT! - Tsunami"
I still can't believe how terrible it is.
It has the same feel as a dropdown on a blog.
Nothing of the level of severity is presented. I'd expect such a serious button to be part of a well designed dashboard.
Plus I'd expect it to be an actual button, with colours.
The section of test systems should be separated with distance from live systems.
People were throwing their kids into storm drains. Clever, but what happens to them after that?
Where do we go? How long do we have to stay there? Who is going to pass out the iodine pills? Where's the clean water? What will we eat? Who will come get us when it's all over?
It seems like we gave a damn about this many years ago during the Cold War. There were drills in schools, public service messages, people bought bomb shelters, there was the Civil Defense. Once in awhile I see one of those public bomb shelter placards on a building and wonder if there really still is one or if it is just some old artifact someone forgot to take down.
We laugh at all this stuff like ironic hipsters and now we see the results.
For all developers asked to design something or not given a design - CSS padding is your friend. Add spacing and then add more. It won't make it a masterpiece but it'll prevent misclicks and make the UI easier to read and understand. Also, use headings like "Amber Alerts", "Weather" and "War". And, use semantic titles like "[TEST] Tsunami" or "ALERT! - Tsunami"
Make all tests blue, all real alerts red. A tiny and simple change, but makes such a difference.
EDIT: I decided to create a mockup with only tiny changes:
1. the current version https://s3.kuschku.de/public/01_current.PNG
2. Color-coding added https://s3.kuschku.de/public/02_colors.PNG - already a significant change, with only one line of CSS
3. Semi-Sorted into groups, and always moved drills to the top of the group (so a person searching top-to-bottom finds the drill first): https://s3.kuschku.de/public/03_sorted.PNG
The result is done with 3 lines of CSS, and an additional class on each link. Tiny change, costs you a single-digit dollar amount to implement, and can be so much more effective.
There was a very similar incident in 1971 ("code word hatefulness"). Back then, three tapes were kept next to a EBS transmitter, two real alerts and one for testing. One day, an operator accidentally loaded the real alert rather than the correct test alert, and many stations prepared to tell the country the nuclear war was imminent. The fix was to: > …In the past three tapes, one for the test and two for actual emerg…
I'm glad the popular discourse has made it from "train employees better" to "design better interfaces" in this case. But as you point out, this is far, far from a new problem. It's as if we lived in a world where bridges have been built for decades with structural engineers as optional, rather than required by building code. If your project had a budget for a structural engineer, you hired one, but if not, fine, you…
There was a very similar incident in 1971 ("code word hatefulness"). Back then, three tapes were kept next to a EBS transmitter, two real alerts and one for testing. One day, an operator accidentally loaded the real alert rather than the correct test alert, and many stations prepared to tell the country the nuclear war was imminent. The fix was to: > …In the past three tapes, one for the test and two for actual emerg…
The point of a drill is to drill the procedure into people, so that when it is required the people are operating on autopilot without the need to actively think about the actions that they are performing. I would prefer to see the only two tapes next to the transmitter are the emergency tapes. If there is a drill then the drill setup will replace these tapes with the test tapes, and maybe place a corrupt tape there o…
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.
For all developers asked to design something or not given a design - CSS padding is your friend. Add spacing and then add more. It won't make it a masterpiece but it'll prevent misclicks and make the UI easier to read and understand. Also, use headings like "Amber Alerts", "Weather" and "War". And, use semantic titles like "[TEST] Tsunami" or "ALERT! - Tsunami"
If a developer were in a position to actually change this, the options should be in separate lists, or even separate pages. If only CSS and HTML is available, they should be in two columns. The screenshots are so bad, not even the juniors I work with would consider deploying this. It's mind boggling.
Not defending the UI too much but I'm imagining this is something built and deployed on government contract in the late 90s or early 2000s (when it was considered high technology that they could do this from a web page in the first place?), occasionally migrated to whatever marginally newer system is required by law while consuming the minimal amount of funding.
It's a damn shame but a lot of govt. stuff ends up in this exact boat because nobody wants to pay to improve something that "already works."
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.
