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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 sy

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.
- nulagrithom 9y ago
  > "Delete all production orders for period" Hah! I built one of those once! The (very abbreviated) conversation went something like this: "I need a way to bulk delete orders." "Umm... Are you sure? I can't think of a good reason to delete a bunch of orders in production." "Yes. We absolutely need this." "Ok..." A short time later "Why does it ask me to confirm? Just make it do it." "Sure..." A week later, after restoring from backup "Remove the bulk delete function. I don't know why we even have that!" Really demanding managers refuse to explain their XY problems... This one never did learn.
  - scrapcode 9y ago
    "Sure! Can you put that in an e-mail?"
    - mulmen 9y ago
      Really underrated advice. If someone asks you for something you know is wrong make sure they get full credit.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    My boss is both understanding and willing to listen, after working with him for 6mths I really can't blame the system on him. The out sourced developers however...very much yes I can. Half the things do the wrong thing wrong, the other half is the wrong thing sorta working. There was clearly no attempt to understand what the user wanted or any attempt to ask the simple questions like "Why do you want X, is X related to Y, would it be handy to pull in related Y for display X" beyond the terrible code quality (and database architecture, I wish I was kidding when I say it took 49 to 69s to search for a quote (I timed it on repeated runs), it now takes ~400-600ms and I still think that's too slow (and I search more things) there is just a complete lack of any thought/effort or consistency. Even the tables aren't consistent across the system - sometimes click a row opens the related entity (with no indication that's what it does), sometimes there is a "view" button in the row on the right, sometimes on the left. It's just pile after pile of UX disasters/architecture code disasters, no wonder the original lead dev came close to a nervous breakdown, I just don't think he was capable of dealing with a system of this complexity.
IshKebab 9y ago
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 software is chosen by people that actually use the software. They can see that it is shit, give it bad reviews etc. I used to work at a very large company who use Teamcity (think git for CAD), which was the worst POS I have ever used. A 90s Java mess that was so slow you could watch it redrawing GUI controls in slow motion. Everybody that used it hated it. At least some of the higher ups liked it, but they didn't actually have to use it.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  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
  - naravara 9y ago
    >I wish we could have a sane conversation about how UI's should be customizeable for the end user Depends a lot on context and the type of application, but a lot of end users get confused about where the line is between UI/UX and backend functionality. A lot of things that might seem to be UI issues might actually have implications for things like resource consumption and application stability. It's a tough balance to strike.
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      Oh yeah, Im not saying it's easy, just that it leads to better workflows and efficiencies for end-users.
- user5994461 9y ago
  Teamcity is the best CI that's available, far ahead of Jenkins. The issue with these tools is the company that is too shit to run them. Put the smallest box they could salvage that's already running a hundred apps. Put the storage on a NAS in another datacenter because there was no more local disk space.
jrockway 9y ago
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, no matter what hoops you make them jump through. Someone who thinks they read the text but didn't comprehend it can easily click through just about anything. In the end, the correct process is probably have two people activate the alert, so that two people have to independently not read the dialog boxes or whatever to send a false alarm. But maybe that doesn't work either, I haven't done any research to that effect and don't really know. On some level, I like the interface. There is a list of possible alerts, and you click the one you want to send to send it. It's just that it doesn't account for the possibility that the user doesn't ACTUALLY want to send the one they clicked. The same problem exists with any powerful tool. Hammers don't check that you're hammering a nail and not your thumb. Cars don't ask "there appears to be a pedestrian, are you sure you meant 'accelerate' and not 'brake'?" With great power comes great responsibility.
- franl 9y ago
  For everyone saying that people are so used to clicking yes on dialog boxes without reading them: Then change that paradigm for different levels of importance. For example, for a test alert, use an automatic countdown that will activate the alert unless canceled within N seconds. The ramifications of a test alert going out accidentally are a lot lower than a real alert going out accidentally. For more serious alerts like this most recent ballistic missile one, turn the entire screen red, have “THIS IS NOT A TEST” header, with an explicit acceptance required to send the alert. Two people may mitigate this existing problem but it still doesn’t get to the root of the issue. 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.
- crispyambulance 9y ago
  > a different interface wouldn't necessarily stop someone who's confused from sending the wrong alert. No. Just. No. It is a horrific design. This one will likely end up in a future UX textbook as a case study. There is simply no excuse for jumbling together a list of options like that. The list items are not even semantically coherent. 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.
swombat 9y ago
Somewhat controversially, I wonder if that existential horror was really so bad. I can think of worse ways to spend 48 minutes that contemplating the reality of your mortality, the fact that you could very well be dead at any moment with no warning whatsoever. It makes you re-evaluate your priorities, maybe makes you stop putting off the life changes you were thinking about that seemed like they could wait until next year. These 48 minutes may well have changed a whole bunch of people's lives for the better, in the long term.
- hutzlibu 9y ago
  Or it will get them killed, once there is a real alarm and they sit down to meditate instead of seeking shelter ...
- crispyambulance 9y ago
  I think that for anyone who has kids, those minutes could very well have been unimaginably awful. I guess you can think of it like waterboarding. Waterboarding doesn't harm anyone, it forces one to contemplate mortality, but it is also something so terrible that one would not wish on anybody.
- nvader 9y ago
  This is an un-empathetic thing to say, because you're ignoring the real emotional experiences of the people who lived through this. The terror experienced by people, especially but not limited to those with predisposition to anxiety, hypertension, panic attacks or suicidal thoughts, will have a real impact on their lives. Or imagine someone who, convinced of an impending death, donates all of their saved wealth to charities online.
- swombat 9y ago
  Perhaps a bit of context might make it seem less like I’m being unempathetic. TL;DR: I was caught in the London tube bombings in 2005 and I believe it changed my life for the better. http://swombat.com/2011/12/19/bomb-changed-my-life http://swombat.com/2011/12/19/bomb-changed-my-life
WalterBright 9y ago
> But these kinds of mistakes happens ALL THE TIME with "enterprise applications." Such misteackes in the cockpit of an airliner are deadly, which is why a great deal of effort is expended to prevent such mistakes. Unfortunately, 1. bad UI design is usually only obvious in hindsight 2. doing good UI design is expensive, and not always worth the effort Of course, I face the same sorts of issues in designing a programming language (D), so this topic is of continuing interest for me.
- kelnos 9y ago
  > bad UI design is usually only obvious in hindsight That's only true if you have little or no experience designing or even using interfaces. As someone who has been bitten by bad UI design in the past, I've noticed and called out a decent amount of bad design well before it actually has caused a problem.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    > That's only true if you have little or no experience designing or even using interfaces. I'm afraid the history of cockpit design in airplanes decisively shows otherwise.
    - kelnos 9y ago
      I think we can agree that some elements of bad UI are obvious, and others are subtle. Based on the photos of the screen shown in the article, this one's dead obvious.
noobermin 9y ago
I haven't seen this comment yet, although I expected it. It is time for those who design internal government applications to take it as seriously as other engineers who work on systems that, when mistakes are made, result in people being hurt or killed. This system clearly has that potential, so people need to take it as seriously as someone designing interfaces for NASA or the military, along with serious consequences of shoddy work.
Twirrim 9y ago
> I expect the same employee in Hawaii fumbled the UI on their "time off request" for psychiatric counseling too. That requires a paper form. The payroll system in the state has failed to be upgraded for some 20 years or so of promises. Staff are paid via checks which are sent direct to their banks because they can't even pay over the wire. Here's a good article about it: http://khon2.com/2015/05/11/costly-consequences-of-outdated-payroll-technology/ http://khon2.com/2015/05/11/costly-consequences-of-outdated-...

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.

nulagrithom 9y ago
> "Delete all production orders for period" Hah! I built one of those once! The (very abbreviated) conversation went something like this: "I need a way to bulk delete orders." "Umm... Are you sure? I can't think of a good reason to delete a bunch of orders in production." "Yes. We absolutely need this." "Ok..." A short time later "Why does it ask me to confirm? Just make it do it." "Sure..." A week later, after restoring from backup "Remove the bulk delete function. I don't know why we even have that!" Really demanding managers refuse to explain their XY problems... This one never did learn.
- scrapcode 9y ago
  "Sure! Can you put that in an e-mail?"
  - mulmen 9y ago
    Really underrated advice. If someone asks you for something you know is wrong make sure they get full credit.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  My boss is both understanding and willing to listen, after working with him for 6mths I really can't blame the system on him. The out sourced developers however...very much yes I can. Half the things do the wrong thing wrong, the other half is the wrong thing sorta working. There was clearly no attempt to understand what the user wanted or any attempt to ask the simple questions like "Why do you want X, is X related to Y, would it be handy to pull in related Y for display X" beyond the terrible code quality (and database architecture, I wish I was kidding when I say it took 49 to 69s to search for a quote (I timed it on repeated runs), it now takes ~400-600ms and I still think that's too slow (and I search more things) there is just a complete lack of any thought/effort or consistency. Even the tables aren't consistent across the system - sometimes click a row opens the related entity (with no indication that's what it does), sometimes there is a "view" button in the row on the right, sometimes on the left. It's just pile after pile of UX disasters/architecture code disasters, no wonder the original lead dev came close to a nervous breakdown, I just don't think he was capable of dealing with a system of this complexity.

IshKebab 9y ago

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 software is chosen by people that actually use the software. They can see that it is shit, give it bad reviews etc. I used to work at a very large company who use Teamcity (think git for CAD), which was the worst POS I have ever used. A 90s Java mess that was so slow you could watch it redrawing GUI controls in slow motion. Everybody that used it hated it. At least some of the higher ups liked it, but they didn't actually have to use it.

CaptSpify 9y ago
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
- naravara 9y ago
  >I wish we could have a sane conversation about how UI's should be customizeable for the end user Depends a lot on context and the type of application, but a lot of end users get confused about where the line is between UI/UX and backend functionality. A lot of things that might seem to be UI issues might actually have implications for things like resource consumption and application stability. It's a tough balance to strike.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    Oh yeah, Im not saying it's easy, just that it leads to better workflows and efficiencies for end-users.
user5994461 9y ago
Teamcity is the best CI that's available, far ahead of Jenkins. The issue with these tools is the company that is too shit to run them. Put the smallest box they could salvage that's already running a hundred apps. Put the storage on a NAS in another datacenter because there was no more local disk space.

jrockway 9y ago

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, no matter what hoops you make them jump through. Someone who thinks they read the text but didn't comprehend it can easily click through just about anything. In the end, the correct process is probably have two people activate the alert, so that two people have to independently not read the dialog boxes or whatever to send a false alarm. But maybe that doesn't work either, I haven't done any research to that effect and don't really know. On some level, I like the interface. There is a list of possible alerts, and you click the one you want to send to send it. It's just that it doesn't account for the possibility that the user doesn't ACTUALLY want to send the one they clicked. The same problem exists with any powerful tool. Hammers don't check that you're hammering a nail and not your thumb. Cars don't ask "there appears to be a pedestrian, are you sure you meant 'accelerate' and not 'brake'?" With great power comes great responsibility.

franl 9y ago
For everyone saying that people are so used to clicking yes on dialog boxes without reading them: Then change that paradigm for different levels of importance. For example, for a test alert, use an automatic countdown that will activate the alert unless canceled within N seconds. The ramifications of a test alert going out accidentally are a lot lower than a real alert going out accidentally. For more serious alerts like this most recent ballistic missile one, turn the entire screen red, have “THIS IS NOT A TEST” header, with an explicit acceptance required to send the alert. Two people may mitigate this existing problem but it still doesn’t get to the root of the issue. 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.
crispyambulance 9y ago
> a different interface wouldn't necessarily stop someone who's confused from sending the wrong alert. No. Just. No. It is a horrific design. This one will likely end up in a future UX textbook as a case study. There is simply no excuse for jumbling together a list of options like that. The list items are not even semantically coherent. 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.

swombat 9y ago

Somewhat controversially, I wonder if that existential horror was really so bad. I can think of worse ways to spend 48 minutes that contemplating the reality of your mortality, the fact that you could very well be dead at any moment with no warning whatsoever. It makes you re-evaluate your priorities, maybe makes you stop putting off the life changes you were thinking about that seemed like they could wait until next year. These 48 minutes may well have changed a whole bunch of people's lives for the better, in the long term.

hutzlibu 9y ago
Or it will get them killed, once there is a real alarm and they sit down to meditate instead of seeking shelter ...
crispyambulance 9y ago
I think that for anyone who has kids, those minutes could very well have been unimaginably awful. I guess you can think of it like waterboarding. Waterboarding doesn't harm anyone, it forces one to contemplate mortality, but it is also something so terrible that one would not wish on anybody.
nvader 9y ago
This is an un-empathetic thing to say, because you're ignoring the real emotional experiences of the people who lived through this. The terror experienced by people, especially but not limited to those with predisposition to anxiety, hypertension, panic attacks or suicidal thoughts, will have a real impact on their lives. Or imagine someone who, convinced of an impending death, donates all of their saved wealth to charities online.
swombat 9y ago
Perhaps a bit of context might make it seem less like I’m being unempathetic. TL;DR: I was caught in the London tube bombings in 2005 and I believe it changed my life for the better. http://swombat.com/2011/12/19/bomb-changed-my-life http://swombat.com/2011/12/19/bomb-changed-my-life

WalterBright 9y ago

> But these kinds of mistakes happens ALL THE TIME with "enterprise applications." Such misteackes in the cockpit of an airliner are deadly, which is why a great deal of effort is expended to prevent such mistakes. Unfortunately, 1. bad UI design is usually only obvious in hindsight 2. doing good UI design is expensive, and not always worth the effort Of course, I face the same sorts of issues in designing a programming language (D), so this topic is of continuing interest for me.

kelnos 9y ago
> bad UI design is usually only obvious in hindsight That's only true if you have little or no experience designing or even using interfaces. As someone who has been bitten by bad UI design in the past, I've noticed and called out a decent amount of bad design well before it actually has caused a problem.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  > That's only true if you have little or no experience designing or even using interfaces. I'm afraid the history of cockpit design in airplanes decisively shows otherwise.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    I think we can agree that some elements of bad UI are obvious, and others are subtle. Based on the photos of the screen shown in the article, this one's dead obvious.

noobermin 9y ago

I haven't seen this comment yet, although I expected it. It is time for those who design internal government applications to take it as seriously as other engineers who work on systems that, when mistakes are made, result in people being hurt or killed. This system clearly has that potential, so people need to take it as seriously as someone designing interfaces for NASA or the military, along with serious consequences of shoddy work.

Twirrim 9y ago

> I expect the same employee in Hawaii fumbled the UI on their "time off request" for psychiatric counseling too. That requires a paper form. The payroll system in the state has failed to be upgraded for some 20 years or so of promises. Staff are paid via checks which are sent direct to their banks because they can't even pay over the wire. Here's a good article about it: http://khon2.com/2015/05/11/costly-consequences-of-outdated-payroll-technology/ http://khon2.com/2015/05/11/costly-consequences-of-outdated-...