> 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.

> How many times do you see a dialog box and click "yes" without even reading it?

A simple fix would be to use a tried and true method that's been effective for decades. Have different popups that read

Type "REAL WORLD" to send this alert.

and

Type "DRILL" to send this alert.

This would be good. Takes 15 min to code this in and you dont have to go redesign a bunch of stuff like some on here are suggesting. Obviously they dont care what it looks like. Fine. But safeguard for such a monumental action they should have had.

I've interacted with systems like that before. My brain looks for the quotes, I double-click to select the text, Control-c, Control-v, and it's done... completely on autopilot.

Trust me, if you get in your users way they will find some way to get rid of you.

this would probably be a bad design aswell. because if a real missle treat happens I would need to get out the warning as fast as possible. the best way would've been a second page with a big button and huge warnings.

You were modded down, but I agree. Contrary to popular opinion, "duck and cover" is not just psychological pacification. It will save lives if worst comes to worst. Literally every millisecond counts when issuing a warning of this nature.

So, yes, bring up a huge flashing red warning dialog with a single confirmation step. And make it easy to issue a retraction.

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.

I can think of two obvious mitigations that would have helped a lot.

1. Separate items intended to be tests from items intended to be live warnings. Draw a green (or yellow) box around the test items and a red box around the live items.

2. Require a confirmation before sending out a live item, and not just clicking a button. Put up a big red flashing warning that says, "You are about to send out a live warning, are you absolutely sure you want to do this?" and require the operator to type "YES".

Taking 1 a little farther, maybe have the first page be links to the test page or the emergency page then add some warnings to the top of the emergency page that make it damn clear that clicking any of the links, even accidentally, will send an actual emergency alert. Make everything red and scary. Hell, make it blink if you have to.

You don't even need confirmation boxes to make this better. Put the "test" options in a section all by itself, clearly labeled as test functionality. Put the real-world scary options in another section, labeled clearly, and perhaps colored red, or badged in such a way (red alert icon, or something) to indicate it's a real-world, serious action.

> With great power comes great responsibility.

Yes, and designers here have a lot of power and responsibility to design an interface that is difficult to use in the wrong way, and doesn't treat options with wildly different real-world consequences as equivalent.

> 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?

How many times to I test the SMS delivery system? Not very often, so I am going to be more careful with any popups. Maybe you only use your computer once a month?