The designers of the UK emergency alert system say the hamfisted wildfire alerts were a misuse of the system https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgw7xj698lo
3
Replies
4
Boosts
The reason this matters is the false alert effect. If you send a user alerts that aren’t perceived as important, they do one of two things:
- If they are able, they turn those alerts off (I know people who have done this as a result of the wildfire alerts)
- They ignore future alerts when they arrive
This effect has caused deaths, for example in the clinical setting when prescribers are so used to dismissing routine compliance-driven alerts that they don’t notice a critical dosage warning.
And the wildfire alerts compounded this by sending *the same alert* multiple times. I know someone who received it five times. In the centre of London. You couldn’t design a scenario more likely to make someone seek out the way to disable them.
And then think of the impact on people who are neurodivergent and may have an increased startle effect, anxiety, misophonia… sending an unnecessary alarm multiple times at random intervals does these people real actual harm.
In design I am constantly trying to persuade more junior designers not to move a fence until they understand why it was put there originally. But whoever was in that Cobra meeting clearly looked at the tests for sending an alert and decided the fence (ie the three criteria safeguarding against the cry-wolf effect) was just in the way of a quick and easy action. That is not good governance, that is idiotic misuse.
