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Univ. of Illinois Goes War-of-the-Worlds On Students
theodp writes "'Strange beings who landed in New Jersey tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from Mars.' (Orson Welles, 1938). 'Active shooter at BUILDING NAME/INTERSECTION. Escape area if safe to do so or shield/secure your location.' (Univ. of Illinois, 2011). An alert message sent out Thursday to 87,000 emails and cell phones warning recipients to escape from an 'active shooter' at the University of Illinois was an error, the Office of the Chief of Police confirmed. 'The alert sent today was caused by a person making a mistake,' explained an email. 'Rather than pushing the SAVE button to update the pre-scripted message, the person pushed the SUBMIT button. We are working with the provider of the Illini-Alert service to implement additional security features in the program to prevent this type of error.'"
But Schroyer said some students were shaken by the initial alert and criticized the university for taking about 12 minutes to send an email confirming it was false.
"That was unacceptable in my opinion," he said.
Really? 12 minutes is too slow? The thing sent out 87,000 e-mails (which takes a while no matter how big and distributed your mail system is), and the person who made the error probably didn't notice until either they got the e-mail or somebody who did told them.
I think 12 minute response time for something like this is pretty impressive.
Do you want to cancel the alarm?
[Cancel] [Cancel]
Bert
Sounds like UI needs a better UI on their emergency notification system.
The really scary part is that we live in a society where the police have to pre-prepare texts and emails to warn students that someone is shooting up their school.
"pre-prepare"?!?
antipaucity
Anyone who does usability studies can assure you that it's a bad idea to have a button labeled "submit" close to one labeled "save".
I am pretty sure this was some kind of web app. A lot of web apps use the standard "submit" button for saving form entries.
This was neither an ID-ten-T, nor a system glitch, but a badly thought through design.
Well, yes. Most of the time people think "Of course I want to do !" when they see a dialog, because they actually did intend to press that button at the time. But they do solve the problem of "Oh no, I didn't mean to click that!" (I've accidentally sent uncompleted emails an embarrassing number of times), and really are useful for things that cannot be undone. Such as, oh, I don't know, sending mass text messages.
This most certainly was an interface problem. If someone is intending to update a template, if they can accidentally send an uncompleted message to thousands of people, the interface designer horribly screwed up. Those options should be no where near each other. Humans routinely make small mistakes, and blaming the user for interface problems only makes things worse.
No, we live in a society that THINKS they have to pre-prepare texts and emails to warn students of this. To be honest considering the time it takes to fire off an email saying "get the hell away from here" having prepared messages for this is kinda dumb in my not so humble opinion.
I wonder what the odds are in fact of getting shot at school...
But schools are gun-free zones. No murderer would ever carry a gun into a gun-free zone and start shooting! It's not allowed.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
This was not an ID10T error. This was bad human interface design.
The user had two choices: "Save" and "Submit". My first reaction to seeing that was "what's the hell is the difference between Save and Submit?"
Apparently:
"Save" = update the template
"Submit" = send out the alert
IMHO, that's a terrible choice of verbs. You could almost reverse the two and still have them make just as much sense. How about "Update" and "Send"? Or this might even be one of those rare times when you want to use longer button names -- "Update Template" and "Send Out Alert". Much less likely for a mix-up like this if those were the button titles.
And this is why "[SAVE MESSAGE TEMPLATE FOR LATER USE] [SEND MESSAGE IMMEDIATELY]"
is better than "[OK] [CANCEL] [ABORT] [ERROR] [RETRY]"
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
In this case FPS skills apply whether the warning is mistaken or not.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Clippy:
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm an alumni of the U of I, and I work here as well. I get these notifications. I thought I'd bring up 2 points:
Overall, I'm satisfied with the system and I was impressed by the very explicit letter from the chief both explaining the error and accepting the blame for the mistake. She also detailed the upcoming efforts to address the error. I'd like to see the same level of accountability from my ISP or phone company.
The Internet has no garbage collection
Better idea: A modal dialog pops up, with a big red countdown from thirty seconds before the 'ok' and 'cancel' buttons become enabled, to make sure the user reads it. It also plays an audio clip at full volume to tell everyone else in the office to check it.
Michael Bolton: That is the worst idea I've ever heard in my life.
Samir: Yes, this is horrible, this idea.
In our system the button that resets all of the application's configuration data requires that the user type in "Break this application". We have yet to have someone claim that they accidentally type the letters to spell out "Break this application".