The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by noir_lord » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:05 PM UTC

nulagrithom wrote: post #257

noir_lord wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Currently unscrewing one of those as my day job. "Delete all production orders for period" - no confirmation, no ability to rollback (beyond me restoring from a backup) that kind of thing. It's not that it isn't user friendly,…

> "Delete all production orders for period" Hah! I built one of those once! The (very abbreviated) conversation went something like this: "I need a way to bulk delete orders." "Umm... Are you sure? I can't think of a good reason to delete a bunch of orders in production." "Yes. We absolutely need this." "Ok..." A short time later "Why does it ask me to confirm? Just make it do it." "Sure..." A week later, after resto…

My boss is both understanding and willing to listen, after working with him for 6mths I really can't blame the system on him.

The out sourced developers however...very much yes I can.

Half the things do the wrong thing wrong, the other half is the wrong thing sorta working.

There was clearly no attempt to understand what the user wanted or any attempt to ask the simple questions like "Why do you want X, is X related to Y, would it be handy to pull in related Y for display X" beyond the terrible code quality (and database architecture, I wish I was kidding when I say it took 49 to 69s to search for a quote (I timed it on repeated runs), it now takes ~400-600ms and I still think that's too slow (and I search more things) there is just a complete lack of any thought/effort or consistency.

Even the tables aren't consistent across the system - sometimes click a row opens the related entity (with no indication that's what it does), sometimes there is a "view" button in the row on the right, sometimes on the left.

It's just pile after pile of UX disasters/architecture code disasters, no wonder the original lead dev came close to a nervous breakdown, I just don't think he was capable of dealing with a system of this complexity.

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

#272

Post by kpil » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:09 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #259

fencepost wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that confirmation window is on every message drill or not, then it would be completely useless. Users have been trained to click past/ignore pop-ups. I say this as someone who watches people log in on PCs and click past a useless (for them) Citrix dialog that includes a "stop asking" checkbox. Citrix added that checkbox some time ago, so these folks have been vacuously ignoring the entire thing at least once per b…

Dialog blindness is very real and problematic. They could consider a different UI response between a drill and active alert. Since drills are the majority of their workload they'd get dialog blindness to the drill confirmation, and then you'd design the active alert confirmation to be a-typical of the drill (for example a different color dialog, and have an "I agree" checkbox on the active, but none of the drill).

I ended up with a checkbox plus a mandatory input field requesting a reason for one irreversible action in a system I worked on.

Just adding a checkbox and later a popup with an additional warning wasn't enough.

An undo function is obviously best, but ufortunately while technically possible, it took a while - possibly a day - to restore due to ripple effects in other systems, and it normally wasn't the person clicking the button that had any reason to notice something was wrong.

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

#273

Post by shuntress » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:13 PM UTC

ryandetzel wrote: post #13

I bet it works in ie6. Is this design horrible? yes. Is this out of the ordinary? Absolutely not. This is very common UX for systems designed 5+ years ago and there are still systems designed today that look like this. This is an alert system, now picture your surgeon or air traffic control using something like this...

There is nothing wrong with the way it _looks_

The problem is that two drastically different interactions are too easy to interchange by mistake.

This application could easily look-and-feel the same while having much a better user experience.

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

#274

Post by bactrian » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

It’s almost so bad (even for gov work) that one wonders if it wasn’t designed like this recently as an excuse to run this “false alarm” exercise.

This is the kind of thing we would want the gov to do and lie to us about because most people can’t handle the truth.

“Put the links really close to tether so we can use that as an excuse.”

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

#275

Post by jrockway » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #61

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 cost…

I don't know. The interface could be better, but a different interface wouldn't necessarily stop someone who's confused from sending the wrong alert. How many times do you see a dialog box and click "yes" without even reading it? I do it all the time, and it's usually fine... except sometimes I think "wait, what did I just agree to!?" Someone under pressure to get that drill going can easily make the same mistakes, no matter what hoops you make them jump through. Someone who thinks they read the text but didn't comprehend it can easily click through just about anything.

In the end, the correct process is probably have two people activate the alert, so that two people have to independently not read the dialog boxes or whatever to send a false alarm. But maybe that doesn't work either, I haven't done any research to that effect and don't really know.

On some level, I like the interface. There is a list of possible alerts, and you click the one you want to send to send it. It's just that it doesn't account for the possibility that the user doesn't ACTUALLY want to send the one they clicked. The same problem exists with any powerful tool. Hammers don't check that you're hammering a nail and not your thumb. Cars don't ask "there appears to be a pedestrian, are you sure you meant 'accelerate' and not 'brake'?" With great power comes great responsibility.

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

#276

Post by arundelo » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

sjs382 wrote: post #114

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-opposite-of-fitts-law/ In the cockpit of every jet fighter is a brightly painted lever that, when pulled, fires a small rocket engine underneath the pilot's seat, blowing the pilot, still in his seat, out of the aircraft to parachute safely to earth. Ejector seat levers can only be used once, and their consequences are significant and irreversible. Applications must have ejector seat…

Formatting the quote like this makes it too wide to be readable on my phone without repeatedly scrolling right then left. Even in landscape mode the first line ends with the "b" of "brightly painted".

A lot of people format quotes with italics, as in this example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485333

HN formatting documentation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

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

#277

Post by user5994461 » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:29 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #207

crispyambulance wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cost…

Enterprise software is chosen by a manager who is told the feature list, but never uses the software. Usability is never considered because the manager never uses the software, and it's not really possible to evaluate usability on paper (they may say "this is really usable" and an application can still be really bad; if they say "it has feature X" and doesn't then you can sue them for breach of contract). Consumer so…

Teamcity is the best CI that's available, far ahead of Jenkins.

The issue with these tools is the company that is too shit to run them. Put the smallest box they could salvage that's already running a hundred apps. Put the storage on a NAS in another datacenter because there was no more local disk space.

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

#278

Post by user5994461 » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

fencepost wrote: post #252

Omnius wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have just an a confirmation window with the the text that was about to be sent. "Everyone is going to die. Run but it won't help"... Is that want you wanted to send [Yes] [No]

If that confirmation window is on every message drill or not, then it would be completely useless. Users have been trained to click past/ignore pop-ups. I say this as someone who watches people log in on PCs and click past a useless (for them) Citrix dialog that includes a "stop asking" checkbox. Citrix added that checkbox some time ago, so these folks have been vacuously ignoring the entire thing at least once per b…

People are taking popups more seriously when it comes to payment... or sending a nuke.

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

#279

Post by jacobush » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #136

jacobush wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is room for error. “This floppy is the drill floppy, I’m sure.” http://nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issu... 1979 Nov 9 Computer Exercise Tape

Use different colors

Of course. My point is that people find ways to screw up, regardless of the underlying technology.

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

#280

Post by triangleman » Tue, Jan 16, 2018, 6:40 PM UTC

evanwise wrote: post #181

andygates wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

J random local civilian warning system really doesn't have to be as tight as "don't blow up the world". There's a scale, here.

The back-up nuclear launch code for the Minuteman missile system used to be 00000000. You have far too much faith in humanity.

That was because, IIRC, Congress mandated a launch code be added to the system, so the military added one and set it to all 0's as a loophole, because their main concern was to make sure the system would work as intended. Not having a launch code when you need it would be a bad thing. None of this precluded the existing, strict, chain of command, which included the famous "biscuit" that the president needs to launch missiles. And I believe the whole thing also needs to be authenticated by the Sec. of Defense.