Hawaiian fake nukes alert caused by fat-fingered fumble of garbage GUI Bad user interface design has been blamed for Hawaii experiencing a brief spate of nuclear panic over the weekend. In case you missed the news, anyone with a smartphone in the island State on Saturday morning received an emergency message stating “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT …
According to a report in The Independent, there was a confirmation stage and the operator did press 'yes'. What it needs is a big, red, flashing illuminated sign at the other end of the room with a big, red, flashing confirmation button to be pressed. I suppose that would be too expensive.
Would it have killed them to have a second person sign off on the 'go' command? They way they set it up, it was only a matter of time before a disgruntled worker triggered it anyway.
Trouble is that you know for certain that when you actually really, really need that second person (ie a real missile is really on the way), they'll have gone to the kharzi for a few minutes easement. And by the time they've done experiencing hell on earth, it'll be too late and it'll arrive for the rest of us in the shape of a rather larger mushroom cloud.
But... like the infamous "four minute warning", it's 100% completely useless anyway.
By the time that alert was cancelled, any missile would have hit and done whatever damage it couldand basically no-one would have had a chance to do anything about it. Hell, that's assuming they could even get the alert out in time, let alone people actually receiving it, reading it and running immediately for shelter (where?).
A second person isn't exactly difficult to come by if you're working on a missile alert system. I presume that second person's function of late has been to slap the first person who fat-fingered it..
I've seen video of nuclear launch drills. The number of steps they go through to open the safe with the codes in them, read them, verify the messages, etc. to launch probably wasn't much less than someone running down the hall and pounding on the door yelling, "We need you n the control room right now!". Or you could just have 3 people available with the proper clearance and ensure at least 2 of them are on duty at all times.
What it needs is
What it needs is for the confirmation dialogue for the real message to look significantly different to the one for the test message, and preferably have the "cancel / confirm" boxes in different relative locations. That way even a half-asleep operator doing the weekly test run would sit up and say, "uh, what? Who changed the... oh. Oops".
Or ditch the drop-down dialogue with the two options next to each other?
Or have a special "test mode" in the software that must be engaged every time a test is run, in much the same way we must put our fire alarm in "test mode" before running a test in order to avoid calling the fire brigade?
M.
What's really needed is TWO drop down boxes, separated by a good amount.
One labelled "TEST MESSAGES"
The other labelled "THE REAL THING"
Pure ass-hattery, mixing the test messages in with the real ones in a single drop down.
// doesn't anyone do good UI design any more?
// [looks at Windows 10 screen]
// ...never mind...
But, but, but... I want to test "THE REAL THING"! And not only the TEST.
Anyway... you answered your question already though. It seemeth that nowadays UIs are sent to the unusability lab and only leave once they scored top. Which imbeciles thought it a good idea to apply mediocre fondleslap UIs everywhere else too?!
The problem is that you get asked so many "are you sure?" for trivial actions so many times a day that people are conditioned to just hit the "ok" button. The best way of actually forcing you to read a message that i've ever seen was when deleting a partion many, many years ago.
It popped a box saying "Do you really want to do this? If so, enter this 4 digit randomly generated number ($number) in the box below and press "ok"
This completely ruled out the "hit the OK" reflex and made very sure that you'd read the message and personally made me think a couple of times before hitting the button after i'd stuck the code in.
We have a similar system in place at my site, whereby a notification is sent to all emergency response personnel. It prompts "Type 'EMERGENCY' to confirm" before it sends the message. Is it THAT HARD? No, it's not. Simply a case of a bad GUI rising up to get a clean chomp at a poor scapegoats arse.
Sometimes it's worth skipping the confirmation checks, which is why dangerous machinery has a big red mushroom headed 'stop' button and a smaller recessed green start button under a flip cover with a key.
I don't have any more facts that the rest of you but someone during the design phase may have decided that saving seconds on the alert during a real attack was worth the risk of a false alarm, given that a real attack would have people panicking and mis-keying like crazy.
Don't worry. reCRAPTCHA is much more straightforward:
On the flip side of the coin. When we had the sad passing of the Queen Mother commercial Broadcasters were supposed to be notified by an alarm. This was supposed to be sent by Independent Radio News by Satellite and would have alerted all their subscribers. The Obit alarm required you to have a 1U box in your racks room and to have it wired in so that everyone knows it's been triggered. To trigger it you had to simultaneously press two buttons under spring loaded plastic covers. Sadly on that Easter Saturday the alarm wasn't triggered correctly and never went off across the country as a result. Someone said that one of the two buttons pressed was a wrong one. Weirdly they had no idea it hadn't gone off as (I believe) they didn't have the same equipment as their subscribers hooked into their studio. It was embarrassing not just for IRN but also their subscribers some of whom were not live at the time. I think at least one had an up tempo music bed being played by the automation whilst this sombre news bulletin went out. Some were doing football commentary of the televised late kick off.
They still have the alarm but it is now supplemented by text messages and other methods.
Why is that urgent?
Because she was on the list of Category One Royals the death of whom requires special news coverage/programming. More importantly the bulletin length increases to five minutes and if you don't change things and you're in automated playout then you may lose the end of the bulletin of have music over the top etc. The BBC had/have a system called RATS which stands for Radio Alert Transmission System (and definitely not Royals About To Snuff it). That was piggybacked onto the 198LW signal of Radio 4. The OBIT alarm is now known as the Major Story Alarm and is also triggered for things like terrorist incidents, major accidents etc.
Requires?
What happens if you don't? People blissfully turn up to work when they should have taken the day off instead?
Yes "requires" as in the news is significant enough to warrant extended and more frequent bulletins etc. When our the Queen as our Head of State sadly dies the same thing will apply. There's more than a few people who will take the time to write a complaint to Ofcom if you just have the story as an and finally at the end of the bulletin.
In Israel we had those missile warning sirens too. Depending on where you lived they would go off with some regularity if the neighbours were having a particularly bad day.
From my experience, it doesn't follow that missile warning = panic. Unless you're American, in which case you must exaggerate everything.
" The Post reports that the messaging system offers a drop-down menue two options: "'Test missile alert' and 'Missile alert'." Whoever sent the message chose the latter instead of the former, with now-well-known results."
Rather than choosing, i would guess that the operator arrive at the desk a few minutes earlier with his morning coffee and miss-click due to him not to be fully acclimatised to the mouse DPI setting (being there, done that).
The option to send a whole state to "kiss goodbye your own arse mode" by a click on a drop down menu without confirmation, genius design.
A drop down menu?!!
What idiot designed that interface? I must mis-select from those at least a dozen times a day!
For something as important as that you need a big red shiny button, a long distance from any other buttons, and as other have suggested, a confirmation box which looks absolutely nothing like any of the others, with hot keys disabled and the OK button not focused so an errant "enter" won't click it.
"The Post reports that the messaging system offers a drop-down menue two options: 'Test missile alert' and 'Missile alert'."
This is the GUI equivalent of negligent homicide. I guess governments just don't do quality control, since they never need to make a profit and they almost never lose their jobs regardless.
BTW, at least two well-known Hollywood actors are now accusing President Trump of creating so much (alleged) war fear that it greatly exacerbated the Hawaii alert panic, making him the main culprit!
TDS strikes again.
"BTW, at least two well-known Hollywood actors are now accusing President Trump of creating so much (alleged) war fear that it greatly exacerbated the Hawaii alert panic, making him the main culprit!"
Well, making him the main culprit is a little harsh, but there would be a lot less fear floating about if he didn't take every chance he could to kick Kim in the balls.
No, there would be very little war fear if the rabid anti-Trump press had not been whipping up such fears since Inauguration Day. I mean. when they weren't blaming him for stupidity, incompetence, racism, sexual harassment, cronyism, collusion, and bad hair. No doubt more charges will be leveled in future.
And today the haters are suggesting we're lucky Trump wasn't watching the news when the alert happened, or he'd have pushed the Button right then and there. This shiza is the same thing they pulled on Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Basically the idea is that any Republican president that doesn't assume the fetal position at all times is just itching to blow up the world. Of course, Democrats would never do such a thing because they aren't bloodthirsty Republicans.
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