Univ. of Illinois Goes War-of-the-Worlds On Students 168
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.'"
Re:Easy solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone who does usability studies can assure you that people won't read confirmations, they'll just blindly click OK. And it's worth noting here that this was entirely an ID10T error, not a computer glitch, although I'm sure a fair number of folks will try to blame it on the computer.
Re:Scary (Score:4, Insightful)
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"?!?
Re:Easy solution (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Easy solution (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Scary (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is why "[SAVE MESSAGE TEMPLATE FOR LATER USE] [SEND MESSAGE IMMEDIATELY]"
is better than "[OK] [CANCEL] [ABORT] [ERROR] [RETRY]"
Re:Umm, 'scuse me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Two things I've learned working at a University:
1) Students will complain about anything.
2) Faculty will complain more than students.
Notification System (Score:5, Insightful)
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.