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.'"

Comments

Umm, 'scuse me?

[Guspaz]

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.

Re:Umm, 'scuse me?

[McKing]

Two things I've learned working at a University:

1) Students will complain about anything.
2) Faculty will complain more than students.

Implemented!

[kanweg]

Do you want to cancel the alarm?
[Cancel] [Cancel]

Bert

Irony

[ncttrnl]

Sounds like UI needs a better UI on their emergency notification system.

Re:Scary

[causality]

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.

Re:Easy solution

[Chuckstar]

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.

INterface guidlines

[hoggoth]

And this is why "[SAVE MESSAGE TEMPLATE FOR LATER USE] [SEND MESSAGE IMMEDIATELY]"

is better than "[OK] [CANCEL] [ABORT] [ERROR] [RETRY]"

Notification System

[dlapine]

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:

1. Fortunately, given the spring break, the actual number of people on campus able to read this was was quite low.
2. Unfortunately, we just had a fire on Green street 2 days ago, and we got an alert from the same system informing us about it. So this warning was probably taken very seriously for those 12 minutes.

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.