“BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” —Text from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency on January 13, 2018
As most everyone is now aware, the state of Hawaii sent its citizens into a panic earlier this month by erroneously issuing a warning that a missile attack was imminent. The state announced that the employee who triggered the false alarm had been “temporarily reassigned.“
But in my opinion, they may have reassigned the wrong employee.
While human error was certainly at play here (he did, after all, confirm his desire to send the alert), there is another factor that I believe is more important and meaningful from a long-term perspective: this was as much about a failure in the user experience as it was about human error.
Somewhere, there is a programmer or development team that designed the user interface that the now-in-hiding employee used to signal either a test of the alert process or to send a real alert to the citizens of Hawaii. And more than anything else, it is that design that failed spectacularly.
It is easy and tempting to see this incident as a one-off occurrence. Predictably, the agency immediately implemented a change to the design so that it now requires a second employee to confirm the sending of an alert.
That quick fix, however, misses the bigger point: the user experience is now mission critical.
