11 ms·

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 pro

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 a design standpoint since it would require more work, more training, more money. The problem is not knowing (or having someone who knows) how to design something better, it's treating good design as a priority. It rarely happens.

agumonkey 9y ago
what would you call regular re-evaluation of a system ? hygiene ?
- Joe-Z 9y ago
  I think we use different words in different contexts: Refactoring, Maintenance come to mind for software engineering. Don't know what the equivalent in the graphics design world would be.
  - fredley 9y ago
    This is not graphic design, it is UX. Graphic design is a component of UX, sometimes, but not here necessarily. Simply reordering the list, and giving it a hierarchy makes it much easier to see what to do: https://twitter.com/iamlucamilan/status/953201356545974272 https://twitter.com/iamlucamilan/status/953201356545974272
- whatever_dude 9y ago
  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.
fredley 9y ago
If a system has critical safety components (using, or misusing the system could harm or kill people), all parts of it should be treated as such. This applies to hospital equipment, missile warning systems, cars, etc. Things like security and reliability rightly get a lot of attention, but UX is just as critical, as this event shows. There are plenty of case studies of poor UX on hospital equipment killing people[1]. When will people learn? [1]: https://medium.com/tragic-design/how-bad-ux-killed-jenny-ef915419879e https://medium.com/tragic-design/how-bad-ux-killed-jenny-ef9...
itronitron 9y ago
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 qualified or don't see the point in the design.
- astura 9y ago
  Yeah, not only that but, in my experience at least, the design of the person who is most opinionated and jerkish is the one which gets implemented.
- tonyarkles 9y ago
  Part of that, I think, is a presentation problem. And I'm admittedly coming from a small sample size of designers I've worked with. When I've been given PSDs in the past, either for review or for implementation, there's never been any documentation with any of the reasoning behind any of it. And when I've asked follow-up questions about why something was done the way it was, I've typically been met with either defensiveness or "that's how it is, now go and build it"
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  This routinely happens where I work. To the extent that our UI is this random mishmash of paradigms depending on who was in the room when the decision was made. If I had a nickel for every time I said "if the mechanical hardware does (blank) we should let the user know so they know not to start the rest of the process" only to get blank stares or laughter from the senior engineers, I would retire. "We'll take care of it with training" is a common refrain, as if training can be remembered with perfect clarity at all times.
  - ClassyJacket 9y ago
    "We'll take care of it with training" is a common refrain, as if training can be remembered with perfect clarity at all times. Something I brought up at my IT Support job yesterday regarding the crazy idea I had to actually document some processes and rules we have. Flow charts and tables and such. Having a reference you can use at any time is much more efficient than expecting everyone to remember literally thousands of facts they're told once in two weeks of training.
crispyambulance 9y ago
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 costly mistakes in shipping and receiving, purchasing and manufacturing because they have to deal with shitty confusing applications that look just like that screenshot. Totally not surprising that the internal application for public emergencies has the same awfulness as PTO request. I expect the same employee in Hawaii fumbled the UI on their "time off request" for psychiatric counseling too.
- naravara 9y ago
  >It looks like quite a normal UI from an "internal" government or enterprise application point of view. The "normal" for enterprise and especially government software is dogshit though. It's because the people doing the procurement are not the people actually using the thing day to day. They treat UX and design as extravagances in the face of spec-sheets and slick marketing decks.
  - acdha 9y ago
    Or, more charitably, they're trying to balance a bunch of conflicting demands for requirements, budget, deadlines, etc.; the procurement process scares away the non-enterprise vendors; and they're not given enough budget to have in-house staff with enough expertise to meaningfully oversee it. If a big vendor says they'll handle it all and mount a huge PR push if anyone questions your decision, it's not hard to see why people opt to overpay.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  > 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, it's that it is actively user hostile.
pc86 9y ago
As a government contractor who did not work on this, I can say I'd bet a lot of money that this is how this screen came about. Initially launched 2-10 years ago with 1-2 links, fast forward a bit and we have this. I can hear a forward thinking developer saying "hey should we at least have colored buttons or something on this screen so it's easy to see what is a test and what is not?" and the product owner/business owner/PM saying "no man just add a link it's faster."
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  > a forward thinking developer saying "hey should we at least have colored buttons Accessibility becomes an issue for colourblind people then.
  - pc86 9y ago
    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.
    - jdietrich 9y ago
      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 designing safety-critical systems with a large user base.
      - pc86 9y ago
        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.
alkonaut 9y ago
Incremental design doesn’t excuse the guy adding thing #2 or thing #3 not paying attention to the whole. Nor does being a contractor excuse it. You don’t get a contract job to add some links to a page. You are contracted to modify it (regardless of what the buyer said he wanted) - and you are responsible for not making it dangerous. Even if that means you can’t take the job. Someone reviewed the spec for this. Someone modified the page of links. Someone reviewed that modification. Someone signed off on the change.
- jacobush 9y ago
  So many assumptions... first, inject twice as many levels. Then make the output text go through a system which makes it impossible to add any formatting. Add a legacy system and some procurement. Mix well. Oh and the person signing off likely never actually sees the output.
  - seanalltogether 9y ago
    Right, and the developer who was at the bottom of the chain might want to clean up the page a bit, but the person above him can't sign off on something like that, nor the person above him. Approval for any modifications has to come from the woman who wrote the business spec that was contracted by your boss's boss's boss and her company has allocated her to another project right now and won't be able to shift hours to handle your request until March.
    - alkonaut 9y ago
      I’d just make the smallest change that “fixed” the problem (in this case for example including the action title in the comfirmation, and calling the non-test vs test action something more clear etc.) My superior would just have to solve the problem of getting the spec change cleared or find another developer. If that was somehow even seen as a problem by the superior - same thing - they’d have to find another developer.
- zentiggr 9y ago
  And none of those someones were likely the same person, nor can it be proven that they ever communicated. Welcome to government contracting. When I was in my sea tour, my SO hated when I said "Designed by the lowest bidder, built by the lowest bidder, manned by the lowest bidder, for the lowest bidder."
christophilus 9y ago
Yeah. I spent all of 1.5 months in a government contracting shop. I quit as fast as possible. Until something changes with project management and politics, that's just a space that is unlikely to produce good software.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  If you have good software, you can more safely use the software without a full-time developer to do maintenance on it. I have worked in shops that intentionally deliver bad software, and those that had higher ethical standards, and the only difference on the business side was that the bad software had higher budgets and more permanent employees (both more-permanent employees and more permanent-employees). The problem is that all the people who can tell the difference between good and bad are employed by the contractors. The direct government employees are still counting SLoC and basing their UI requirements on the Excel spreadsheets that were directly copied from paper forms from the 1970s. I am not making this up. The contract awards are still mostly based on who you know, rather than the quality of your past work, so given the choice between a slipshod initial implementation with a juicy back end in the form of continual maintenance and doing it right the first time and delivering something that never needs contractor support ever again, it isn't surprising that a lot of companies opt for the former even when most of their employees would prefer the latter.
zentiggr 9y ago
Right... the time and effort to even [sort out the links into TEST and LIVE categories in adjacent boxes] as the minimal disambiguation would likely not be granted because budgets.
SketchySeaBeast 9y ago
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 expensive, the client will suggest the second themselves. And once the precedent is set with a second link, you're out of luck when you try to redesign for link #3. It's a no win.
- evanwise 9y ago
  To me this kind of thinking from management is, frankly, negligent. If you're working on a simple e-commerce site I suppose it's excusable, because in the end, the customer is going to pay the cost of poor design in lost business and that is their decision. For safety critical systems it is absolutely inexcusable, and the manager responsible should face criminal liability. No one should die because some middle manager was cutting corners to hit his quarterly targets.
- robotsonic 9y ago
  I don't buy the 'it costs too much' excuse. How much does it cost to go: <H2> Testing </H2> ... <H2> FOR REAL </H2> ... It's not perfect, but at least the test alerts and the real alerts are not mixed together.
  - whatever_dude 9y ago
    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.
    - SketchySeaBeast 9y ago
      "Should 'FOR REAL' be all in capitals? Bold? Or maybe a different font? I know! We can find a proprietary font that's 99.9% like Arial, but we'll need to throw in specific rules to who can use it and how..."
thaumaturgy 9y ago
And with every single modification, at least one person involved said, "this sucks, can we redesign it yet?", and was told, "no, we don't want to spend the money on that right now." It's a catch-22 for developers in this position: you have to be able to justify every single major improvement from a position of cost-benefit to the business, but to do that adequately well enough to convince a client to spend the money requires up-front time and money expenditure that is hard to justify until after it's done.
sizzle 9y ago
This is the same conclusion I draw from being in the trenches of financial services (fintech) shudders
cema 9y ago
"Good enough for government work". The lowest bidder, etc. I have seen a large number of government web sites, and most of them, especially at the state level (I am talking about US states), have a horrible UX.
amelius 9y ago
Still, it would be a fun exercise to imagine how e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft or Apple would have designed this screen :)
- jtolmar 9y ago
  Google, Apple, and Twitter have hidden the actual launch alert behind three layers of sub menus. Facebook has three layers of sub menus too, but that's the drill and the actual launch is on the front page. Microsoft just has one of these buttons; what's hidden behind the three layers of sub menus is the toggle for whether it's a drill.
  - amelius 9y ago
    Microsoft has hidden the drill behind the launch button. Facebook has a dozen of fake drill buttons, and one real drill button, but you can't tell which is which. Apple has a launch button but it doesn't work because the missiles are of a different brand. Google's drill button turns out to be an ad.
  - ClassyJacket 9y ago
    Facebook's drill button would be hidden in a huge list of other buttons, the order of which changes randomly every time the page is loaded, and the button would only show up 30% of the time based on an algorithm. Some users would never see the button based on what the algorithm decides, despite specifically adding the button to their list.
WalterBright 9y ago
There is a bit of a tension here. For a missile alert, every second faster the alert goes out, there are lives saved. Having an "are you sure?" request for confirmation is probably a bad tradeoff. A better idea might be an "Oops, belay that!" next to it so it can be cancelled just as quickly.
chaostheory 9y ago
> The problem is not knowing (or having someone who knows) how to design something better, it's treating good design as a priority. It rarely happens What some designers don't realize is that, in reality, they are also in sales. If they can't effectively pitch their ideas to non-designer audiences, it doesn't matter how good their design is; it won't be used. It's not a coincidence that Paul Rand would include a hefty proposal book along with his logos.
wmeredith 9y ago
Self promotion incoming... I’ve written a few versions of this article over the years. I keep hoping I’ll see the day that it’s no longer prescient: “Why the DMV Website Sucks” https://hackernoon.com/why-the-dmv-website-sucks-2f27a367baa9?source=messageShare-b7a077d5c4f5-1516156908 https://hackernoon.com/why-the-dmv-website-sucks-2f27a367baa...
fapjacks 9y ago
Plus also Hawaii is a deeply nepotistic state. You don't get a contract to build this kind of thing without knowing somebody who knows somebody. So bidding for this kind of work is much less about qualifications than it is about who you know. Way, way less than anywhere on the mainland. Way less. Whatever you're thinking along the lines of "Oh, no, this is just what it's like in government work," it's not even close to the situation in Hawaii.

agumonkey 9y ago

what would you call regular re-evaluation of a system ? hygiene ?

Joe-Z 9y ago
I think we use different words in different contexts: Refactoring, Maintenance come to mind for software engineering. Don't know what the equivalent in the graphics design world would be.
- fredley 9y ago
  This is not graphic design, it is UX. Graphic design is a component of UX, sometimes, but not here necessarily. Simply reordering the list, and giving it a hierarchy makes it much easier to see what to do: https://twitter.com/iamlucamilan/status/953201356545974272 https://twitter.com/iamlucamilan/status/953201356545974272
whatever_dude 9y ago
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.

fredley 9y ago

If a system has critical safety components (using, or misusing the system could harm or kill people), all parts of it should be treated as such. This applies to hospital equipment, missile warning systems, cars, etc. Things like security and reliability rightly get a lot of attention, but UX is just as critical, as this event shows. There are plenty of case studies of poor UX on hospital equipment killing people[1]. When will people learn? [1]: https://medium.com/tragic-design/how-bad-ux-killed-jenny-ef915419879e https://medium.com/tragic-design/how-bad-ux-killed-jenny-ef9...

itronitron 9y ago

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 qualified or don't see the point in the design.

astura 9y ago
Yeah, not only that but, in my experience at least, the design of the person who is most opinionated and jerkish is the one which gets implemented.
tonyarkles 9y ago
Part of that, I think, is a presentation problem. And I'm admittedly coming from a small sample size of designers I've worked with. When I've been given PSDs in the past, either for review or for implementation, there's never been any documentation with any of the reasoning behind any of it. And when I've asked follow-up questions about why something was done the way it was, I've typically been met with either defensiveness or "that's how it is, now go and build it"
jschwartzi 9y ago
This routinely happens where I work. To the extent that our UI is this random mishmash of paradigms depending on who was in the room when the decision was made. If I had a nickel for every time I said "if the mechanical hardware does (blank) we should let the user know so they know not to start the rest of the process" only to get blank stares or laughter from the senior engineers, I would retire. "We'll take care of it with training" is a common refrain, as if training can be remembered with perfect clarity at all times.
- ClassyJacket 9y ago
  "We'll take care of it with training" is a common refrain, as if training can be remembered with perfect clarity at all times. Something I brought up at my IT Support job yesterday regarding the crazy idea I had to actually document some processes and rules we have. Flow charts and tables and such. Having a reference you can use at any time is much more efficient than expecting everyone to remember literally thousands of facts they're told once in two weeks of training.

crispyambulance 9y ago

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 costly mistakes in shipping and receiving, purchasing and manufacturing because they have to deal with shitty confusing applications that look just like that screenshot. Totally not surprising that the internal application for public emergencies has the same awfulness as PTO request. I expect the same employee in Hawaii fumbled the UI on their "time off request" for psychiatric counseling too.

naravara 9y ago
>It looks like quite a normal UI from an "internal" government or enterprise application point of view. The "normal" for enterprise and especially government software is dogshit though. It's because the people doing the procurement are not the people actually using the thing day to day. They treat UX and design as extravagances in the face of spec-sheets and slick marketing decks.
- acdha 9y ago
  Or, more charitably, they're trying to balance a bunch of conflicting demands for requirements, budget, deadlines, etc.; the procurement process scares away the non-enterprise vendors; and they're not given enough budget to have in-house staff with enough expertise to meaningfully oversee it. If a big vendor says they'll handle it all and mount a huge PR push if anyone questions your decision, it's not hard to see why people opt to overpay.
noir_lord 9y ago
> 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, it's that it is actively user hostile.

pc86 9y ago

As a government contractor who did not work on this, I can say I'd bet a lot of money that this is how this screen came about. Initially launched 2-10 years ago with 1-2 links, fast forward a bit and we have this. I can hear a forward thinking developer saying "hey should we at least have colored buttons or something on this screen so it's easy to see what is a test and what is not?" and the product owner/business owner/PM saying "no man just add a link it's faster."

zimpenfish 9y ago
> a forward thinking developer saying "hey should we at least have colored buttons Accessibility becomes an issue for colourblind people then.
- pc86 9y ago
  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.
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    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 designing safety-critical systems with a large user base.
    - pc86 9y ago
      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.

alkonaut 9y ago

Incremental design doesn’t excuse the guy adding thing #2 or thing #3 not paying attention to the whole. Nor does being a contractor excuse it. You don’t get a contract job to add some links to a page. You are contracted to modify it (regardless of what the buyer said he wanted) - and you are responsible for not making it dangerous. Even if that means you can’t take the job. Someone reviewed the spec for this. Someone modified the page of links. Someone reviewed that modification. Someone signed off on the change.

jacobush 9y ago
So many assumptions... first, inject twice as many levels. Then make the output text go through a system which makes it impossible to add any formatting. Add a legacy system and some procurement. Mix well. Oh and the person signing off likely never actually sees the output.
- seanalltogether 9y ago
  Right, and the developer who was at the bottom of the chain might want to clean up the page a bit, but the person above him can't sign off on something like that, nor the person above him. Approval for any modifications has to come from the woman who wrote the business spec that was contracted by your boss's boss's boss and her company has allocated her to another project right now and won't be able to shift hours to handle your request until March.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    I’d just make the smallest change that “fixed” the problem (in this case for example including the action title in the comfirmation, and calling the non-test vs test action something more clear etc.) My superior would just have to solve the problem of getting the spec change cleared or find another developer. If that was somehow even seen as a problem by the superior - same thing - they’d have to find another developer.
zentiggr 9y ago
And none of those someones were likely the same person, nor can it be proven that they ever communicated. Welcome to government contracting. When I was in my sea tour, my SO hated when I said "Designed by the lowest bidder, built by the lowest bidder, manned by the lowest bidder, for the lowest bidder."

christophilus 9y ago

Yeah. I spent all of 1.5 months in a government contracting shop. I quit as fast as possible. Until something changes with project management and politics, that's just a space that is unlikely to produce good software.

logfromblammo 9y ago
If you have good software, you can more safely use the software without a full-time developer to do maintenance on it. I have worked in shops that intentionally deliver bad software, and those that had higher ethical standards, and the only difference on the business side was that the bad software had higher budgets and more permanent employees (both more-permanent employees and more permanent-employees). The problem is that all the people who can tell the difference between good and bad are employed by the contractors. The direct government employees are still counting SLoC and basing their UI requirements on the Excel spreadsheets that were directly copied from paper forms from the 1970s. I am not making this up. The contract awards are still mostly based on who you know, rather than the quality of your past work, so given the choice between a slipshod initial implementation with a juicy back end in the form of continual maintenance and doing it right the first time and delivering something that never needs contractor support ever again, it isn't surprising that a lot of companies opt for the former even when most of their employees would prefer the latter.

zentiggr 9y ago

Right... the time and effort to even [sort out the links into TEST and LIVE categories in adjacent boxes] as the minimal disambiguation would likely not be granted because budgets.

SketchySeaBeast 9y ago

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 expensive, the client will suggest the second themselves. And once the precedent is set with a second link, you're out of luck when you try to redesign for link #3. It's a no win.

evanwise 9y ago
To me this kind of thinking from management is, frankly, negligent. If you're working on a simple e-commerce site I suppose it's excusable, because in the end, the customer is going to pay the cost of poor design in lost business and that is their decision. For safety critical systems it is absolutely inexcusable, and the manager responsible should face criminal liability. No one should die because some middle manager was cutting corners to hit his quarterly targets.
robotsonic 9y ago
I don't buy the 'it costs too much' excuse. How much does it cost to go: <H2> Testing </H2> ... <H2> FOR REAL </H2> ... It's not perfect, but at least the test alerts and the real alerts are not mixed together.
- whatever_dude 9y ago
  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.
  - SketchySeaBeast 9y ago
    "Should 'FOR REAL' be all in capitals? Bold? Or maybe a different font? I know! We can find a proprietary font that's 99.9% like Arial, but we'll need to throw in specific rules to who can use it and how..."

thaumaturgy 9y ago

And with every single modification, at least one person involved said, "this sucks, can we redesign it yet?", and was told, "no, we don't want to spend the money on that right now." It's a catch-22 for developers in this position: you have to be able to justify every single major improvement from a position of cost-benefit to the business, but to do that adequately well enough to convince a client to spend the money requires up-front time and money expenditure that is hard to justify until after it's done.

sizzle 9y ago

This is the same conclusion I draw from being in the trenches of financial services (fintech) shudders

cema 9y ago

"Good enough for government work". The lowest bidder, etc. I have seen a large number of government web sites, and most of them, especially at the state level (I am talking about US states), have a horrible UX.

amelius 9y ago

Still, it would be a fun exercise to imagine how e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft or Apple would have designed this screen :)

jtolmar 9y ago
Google, Apple, and Twitter have hidden the actual launch alert behind three layers of sub menus. Facebook has three layers of sub menus too, but that's the drill and the actual launch is on the front page. Microsoft just has one of these buttons; what's hidden behind the three layers of sub menus is the toggle for whether it's a drill.
- amelius 9y ago
  Microsoft has hidden the drill behind the launch button. Facebook has a dozen of fake drill buttons, and one real drill button, but you can't tell which is which. Apple has a launch button but it doesn't work because the missiles are of a different brand. Google's drill button turns out to be an ad.
- ClassyJacket 9y ago
  Facebook's drill button would be hidden in a huge list of other buttons, the order of which changes randomly every time the page is loaded, and the button would only show up 30% of the time based on an algorithm. Some users would never see the button based on what the algorithm decides, despite specifically adding the button to their list.

WalterBright 9y ago

There is a bit of a tension here. For a missile alert, every second faster the alert goes out, there are lives saved. Having an "are you sure?" request for confirmation is probably a bad tradeoff. A better idea might be an "Oops, belay that!" next to it so it can be cancelled just as quickly.

chaostheory 9y ago

> The problem is not knowing (or having someone who knows) how to design something better, it's treating good design as a priority. It rarely happens What some designers don't realize is that, in reality, they are also in sales. If they can't effectively pitch their ideas to non-designer audiences, it doesn't matter how good their design is; it won't be used. It's not a coincidence that Paul Rand would include a hefty proposal book along with his logos.

wmeredith 9y ago

Self promotion incoming... I’ve written a few versions of this article over the years. I keep hoping I’ll see the day that it’s no longer prescient: “Why the DMV Website Sucks” https://hackernoon.com/why-the-dmv-website-sucks-2f27a367baa9?source=messageShare-b7a077d5c4f5-1516156908 https://hackernoon.com/why-the-dmv-website-sucks-2f27a367baa...

fapjacks 9y ago

Plus also Hawaii is a deeply nepotistic state. You don't get a contract to build this kind of thing without knowing somebody who knows somebody. So bidding for this kind of work is much less about qualifications than it is about who you know. Way, way less than anywhere on the mainland. Way less. Whatever you're thinking along the lines of "Oh, no, this is just what it's like in government work," it's not even close to the situation in Hawaii.