I think I'm the only person who saw it and thought it was fine. It's a list of clearly labeled text links, very clear very simple. There are some changes that could be made to separate drills/tests from real events (or a different naming convention), but I'm surprised to see many people call a single page text list "terrible UI".
There are some great comments above on this. Two that stand out:
fredley 36 minutes ago
If a system has critical safety components (using, or misusing the system could harm or kill people), all parts of it should be treated as such. This applies to hospital equipment, missile warning systems, cars, etc. Things like security and reliability rightly get a lot of attention, but UX is just as critical, as this event shows. There are plenty of case studies of poor UX on hospital equipment killing people[1]. When will people learn? https://medium.com/tragic-design/how-bad-ux-killed-jenny-ef9...
fredley 33 minutes ago
This is not graphic design, it is UX. Graphic design is a component of UX, sometimes, but not here necessarily. Simply reordering the list, and giving it a hierarchy makes it much easier to see what to do: https://twitter.com/iamlucamilan/status/953201356545974272
It's all about context. It might be fine if that's a list of your website bookmarks and if you click the wrong one you just click a different one. But when the consequences of clicking the wrong one are such high magnitude, it's bad design.
And I don't even think it's up for debate. If the design of the page just made someone accidentally alert a whole state of an incoming missile, then it's bad.
I think someone will always be able to click the wrong link, especially if given the wrong information or confusing information "Give the message for PACOM CDW, ... Oh sorry you did the DRILL PACOM, right?" The larger problem was not having a quick system in place to redact an erroneous message.
But I've read a lot of suggestions like spreading items across multiple pages, adding passwords, or big warning colors and lines around the live options that are not just obfuscating/distracting/annoying but are bound to cause errors and open the door for even worse design.
And remember that when you need to click it, you will be 100% entirely terrified by the incoming missile. Parsing through the list will itself be challenging under those circumstances.
The thing is is that those two items look very very similar and and our eyes routinely scan or skip over words in in text. For example, how many repetetitions were there just in in this paragraph I just wrote?
