Next outrage is when we will find out how much this technological masterpiece actually costed.
The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
221–230 of 375 posts
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#222Earlier 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…
I think this is the key here. Why do we keep trusting the one person who never uses the actual product to decide which product everyone should use?
I wish we could have a sane conversation about how UI's should be customizeable for the end user
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a big problem is that people that don't have a lot of experience with design treat design decisions as subjective and arbitrary when in fact there is a lot of science to back up certain design choices (human vision, cognitive psychology, and not A/B testing.) As a result the approval process for any design, whether the initial or a redesign, gets stuck on the desks of various people that either don't feel qua…
You don't need any science to know to make an action with very serious consequences : hard to invoke (e.g. must click through three confirmation forms that all require some real-time thought to complete correctly) and clear in purpose (e.g. displays in large blinking text : "This is an action for which you'll be fired if you are doing it in error". There had to have been quite the cavalcade of idiots behind the makin…
I read that there was a conformation screen the employee clicked through the confirmation screen.
People blindly click through confirmation screens all the time.
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You are contracted to modify it (regardless of what the buyer said he wanted) - and you are responsible for not making it dangerous. Actually, with government contracts, you are legally obligated to perform only the task assigned. Providing work to the government without the government paying for it is illegal . And you are only being paid for what's in the contract. (This is actually overall a good thing. Otherwis…
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 would never do it, but problems like this don't happen in a vacuum and are rarely one person's fault. It's a whole system that leads to this.
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#225"Days after Hawaii alert gaffe, Japan issues false alarm about a missile launch" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-japan...
Wow, that's a pretty big coincidence. What would be the purpose of both states intentionally setting off false alarms?
I expect that we're seeing organizations dust off or setup new systems to warn their populations of incoming missiles as a result of the rising tensions with North Korea. There's an argument to be made that there could and are political motivations in addition to the concerns about safety.
In any case, as these systems are powered up, updated, overhauled or even replaced, there's testing going on. And when there's testing, there's the opportunity for just this type of gaffe.
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#226https://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…
There's a lot we can learn from aviation: accident retrospectives, checklists, master caution alarms, crew relationship management, human factors research, etc. However, my knowledge of these things is a bit piecemeal and anecdotal. Does anyone know a good book on these things?
I actually would recommend this book: http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#227Lots of money to be made in "Enterprise" software, and even bigger amount of impact to be made by having smart developers working in the space.
I'm not really sure where the problem lies, partly economics, and part lack of specialized knowledge. In this case that knowledge might be laws around AMBER alerts, how to respond to an RFP for such a system, or even just not knowing that such systems need to built.
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like it was absolutely a money issue. In my experience it's a matter of going "well, we'd like to redesign the screen for $x, but we could throw another link on there for a quarter of $x", and the user will always go with the cheaper option. You can't just say "No, we need to go with the more expensive option" because that makes the client unhappy, and we don't want that, and if you only go with the more expen…
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.
I bet the naming of each link was approved by a 16-people committee over a 4-week process, each bikeshedding it their own way and forgetting about the actual context of it.
Then adding one new link with any reasonable categorization might mean changing the label on a separate link to make it more distinct, and no one wants to go there anymore.
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily. Colorblind doesn't mean "everything is grey" it means you have trouble distinguishing between between a few, usually fairly specific colors. There are plenty of color schemes out that that are perfectly fine for colorblind folks, especially when you only need 2-3 distinct colors.
Nope. Dichromatic color deficiency is the most common form of color blindness, but about one in 20,000 people are completely unable to perceive color due to a variety of ophthalmic and neurological deficits. Even among dichromats, you can only reliably expect all users to be able to distinguish red and blue. It's probably not worth worrying about too much in most circumstances, but it is a relevant factor if you're d…
Achromatopsia affects one in ~33,000 people. By comparison, any form of colorblindness affects one in 8 men and one in 200 women.
I'm not sure "someone using this system might see everything as the same shade of grey" is a realistic concern at those levels of incidence.
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#230It'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…
what would you call regular re-evaluation of a system ? hygiene ?
I normally use "code health" or "scout's rule", but it's more about the implementation than the design.
"Hygiene" is a great word overall, for both cases.