281–290 of 375 posts
If that’s the user interface, I can hardly imagine what’s underneath. Is this thing actually secure with properly designed two-factor authentication, etc. Or a weak password and a PHP script and some rubbish like that?…
“The BMD False Alarm link is the added feature to prevent further mistakes” This is a joke right? It’s only going to make recovering from a mistake easier, it’s not going to prevent anything.
This is just my observation, but this is what you get when software is used in such critical situations and yet the entire software engineering/development field is completely non-standardized and practically the wild west. Again, this is my opinion, which I know a lot of people disagree with, but we're going to keep coming up against this kind of stuff until software developers become licensed and accountable for th…
Fix proposal subthread. Can we harness HN collective intelligence to vote up some good suggestions? Instructions: * Reply with your suggested fix to this comment. (That way we can vote equally between suggestions, instead of having them being scattered throughout the thread). * First line is simple one-line summary, optionally followed by a blank line then some exposition. Example: ---------- Simple fix: Seperate lin…
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…
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, n…
Same thing with your hammer analogy. Everything shouldn’t look like a nail then! A real alert should look like a nail. A real ballistic missile alert should look like a railroad spike (aka really big nail). Test alerts should look like a screw. Etc.
If @Github would have built the Hawaii text alert service: https://twitter.com/mattiasgeniar/status/952929404925202432
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…
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, n…
> a different interface wouldn't necessarily stop someone who's confused from sending the wrong alert.
Ultimately, however, the individual, his chain-of-command and the system designers have to be held accountable. The scary thing is that many people saw this and said nothing, almost certainly some people heard complaints about this and did nothing, somebody even signed off on this. It demonstrates an organizational problem, I think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 clickin…
Unfortunately a lot of organizations don't want to invest the time/resources into creating it. Particularly when it gets into discussing exactly how the underlying data should be handled during the undo window (e.g. does it exist? Is it just flagged deleted? What about relations? Do all of our queries that touch this data check that? Etc).
1) How in the name of everything holy did this monstrosity of an interface for such an important system get approved in the first place?
2) Given a monstrosity of a interface: Why are there, apparently, ZERO safeguards in place to make sure the human error rate at least has a HUGE chance to get close to zero?